#(the only silver lining is that if (when) she accidentally has a child during that process
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floof-writes · 11 months ago
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*in a whisper* Brennan. Brennan please. I know you have a lot to do. But please. Stop playing Zelda like an NPC. Let her do cool shit like the PCs she's supposedly on equal footing with. Brennan, she didn't even rage until the last round of battle. And only then to give Penny sneak attack. She didn't even action surge. You had her take two levels of fighter so she could ride a horse into an ice cave to give info to the PCs? Let her kill things. I know she's very good at it.
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my-brain-threw-up · 2 years ago
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König SFW Headcanons
Background:
Real name is Elias Beckenbauer.
He’s 29 years old and from the Innsbruck area. His birthday is November 10th, making him a Scorpio.
Has a big extended family, but he is an only child.
His parents are both teachers at a secondary school. His dad teaches biology and his mom teaches literature.
He was raised around tons of younger cousins that are like little siblings to him.
Very close with his grandma on his dad’s side because she used to babysit him a lot.
His family is nominally Catholic, but most are not practicing, including him. Still attends the odd Christmas mass if he’s home for the holidays, mostly to make grandma happy.
Gets his height from his mom’s side. His dad’s family are averagely sized.
His constant growth made him gawky for most of his adolescence.
He didn’t fill out and grow into his height until his very late teens, mostly because he started working out and eating right when he joined the military.
His parents did not initially accept his choice to join the military, wishing he would choose a safer line of work. They relented, though, and are very proud of his accomplishments.
Appearance:
He’s 6'7'' or 201 cm tall. (6'10" is not technically canon, and visually, he looks about the same height as one of my friends who is 6'6" so I rounded up)
Has very dark brown, thick hair.
Used to have long hair as a teen. Shaved it off when he joined the military. Now he lets the top grow out a bit.
Got that 90s heartthrob, Dimitri from Anastasia, middle part going on. Has an undercut to stay cool under his mask.
Freckles and sunburns easily. But he eventually tans once the burn goes away.
Keeps his face clean shaven, finds facial hair too itchy and hot.
Has a scar across the middle of his mouth from accidentally being slashed with a knife during training. The other guy felt really bad.
Had acne as a teen. It's mostly cleared up now but he gets a breakout every so often from stress. Has a few clusters of acne scars on his back.
The front of his hips have some old, faded stretch marks from his extreme growth spurts.
True to form, he's got some serious muscles. Absolute tree trunk legs.
Has kinda crooked teeth. His canines flare out slightly from his other teeth.
Wears predominately simple t-shirt and pants combos in dark colors. He does like jewelry, though. Especially rings that he can fiddle with.
Pierced ears. Wears small silver rings in them when he remembers to.
Interests:
Favorite color is forest green.
Will listen to most kinds of music, but likes metal and industrial music the most. Rammstein, Type O Negative, Deftones, and KMFDM fan.
Though he doesn’t like regular crowds, he loves concerts. The loud music and the energy of the collective excitement is somewhat regulating for him. It gets his sillies out in a place where it feels acceptable.
He prefers to be in the bleachers instead of the pit, though, since he doesn't want to block the view.
He likes to cook, mostly standard German fare he learned from grandma. Makes a very good Kaiserschmarren, since that was his favorite growing up.
Coffee over tea. Treats himself to a fancy, flavored coffee periodically.
Parents got him into skiing as a child, both downhill and cross-country. Was a member of the ski club at his secondary school. Loved that he could cover his face with goggles and a balaclava. It made him feel protected from people’s eyes.
Got into marksmanship because he wanted to ski a biathlon. He has participated in three so far, getting fourth place as his personal best.
Also tried out ice hockey as a kid, but found that he didn’t like contact sports. Still enjoys watching it, though.
Extras (mostly funny):
Very clean, but couldn't organize to save his life.
Like he doesn't let dirty clothes pile up, but babes definitely lives out of laundry baskets because he forgets to fold it.
Snorts when he laughs.
Extensive mug collection.
*slightly NSFW* Batshit feral sense of humor. Definitely owns the "Don't bully me. I'll cum," t-shirt.
Owns a weighted blanket.
Uses the :3 emoji whenever possible because he thinks it's funny.
Unbeatable at Mario Kart.
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emyluwinter · 3 years ago
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A little care from the Prefect~
Gift When Rook had a birthday, Yuu asked him for a phone to give him a "gift"
- Oh Trickster-san. I'm burning with curiosity~
Yuu sends several files to the Hunter phone and presses record playback.
"Good Morning Rook! I wish you a good day!"
This phrase was said... by himself…
Neigu Le Blanche
Rook froze in disbelief. Yuu awkwardly smiling shyly giving back the phone to the owner.
- I'm sorry I was in a bit of a hurry..there are only about 10 replicas.
Rook seems petrified on the spot. And stopped breathing?
Yuu gets nervous and looks at Vil. She was very nervous. Killing the birthday boy was definitely not part of her plans.
- I think I accidentally killed him…
Rook starts fanning his face with his palms. He was barely holding back tears.
- Oh, what an amazing gift!!I am so touched that tears of joy threaten to ruin my makeup. Oh, this is incredible!!Ah, i can't miss a single tear. My body is bursting with happiness!
Rook was so happy that he wanted to know the details of how Yuu was able to get something like this. Everything turned out to be much simpler. When there was a VDC, Yuu asked Neigu to make voice cues for the Rook.
For one of the most loyal fans. Rook listened to these lines for 40 minutes.
Vil almost strangled Yuu when he heard Neigu voice in his dorm for so long.
Rook gave Yu about two poems and 15-minute hugs.
**
Lunch time~
From the very beginning, the day turned out to be very difficult and eventful. Even for Jade, there were a lot of knots in the threads that were difficult to untangle.
And as luck would have it, his favorite dishes with mushrooms were sold out in the cafeteria.
After finding a place for himself and starting the meal, Jade looks in surprise as someone on the right puts a large fried grimm in cheese on his plate.
- A hard day, yes, Jade-senpai?
Yuu received the most tender and appreciative smile from Jade. Did this little Prefect notice his upset look under his eternal mask? Indeed, this magical student is full of riddles.
- Oya-oya. Are you trying to bribe me, Prefect?
- no. I just saw how upset you were that there was nothing with mushrooms and wanted to share.
- How merciful of you. ~
- Let's agree that you just charged me for a couple of mushrooms with cheese so I could sit next to you?
Yuu remembered well about the "life motto" of this dorm. And she was also in her right mind so as not to get herself into unnecessary trouble.
Jade agreed.
He spent the rest of the day in a better mood. Floyd and Azul were seriously scared, because he was usually like this after hiking. And this entailed whole bags of unknown mushrooms and other herbs.
Tea~
Lilia always suffered from the long sleeves on his lab coat. And Yuu noticed how he already rolls up his sleeves once every 4.
- Lilia Senpai can you borrow your robe for a while?
- Ufufu. What do you want to do, child? - Lilia was very curious to find out what she was up to.
Taking out a small sewing kit from her pocket, Yuu folded the fabric to the desired length, measuring the approximate distance. And I made several stitches in four sections in the places where it was necessary to hold the fabric.
- Please try it on if I can change anything.
Lilia was pleasantly surprised when he found that the sleeves now do not get in the way, and they are neatly sewn.
- Wonderful!!Now me don't have to be distracted by it during classes! What a kind, wonderful child!
Yuu was slightly embarrassed.
- It's not a big deal.
- Prefect, please come to our tea party in Diasomnia today. I want to thank you properly!
Silver had to barricade the kitchen together with other students when Lilia wanted to bake "cookies" for tea with Yuu.
Lilia was a little offended that he was not allowed into the kitchen again.
Malleus quickly resolved the conflict by saying that it would be better to avoid cookies because he does not know if the Prefect has an allergy. And so that there is no conflict, they will take some jam or small snacks from the Cafeteria.
That evening, Yuu was saved from his own attempted murder without even knowing it.
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A/N: I would like to preface this by letting everyone know that I am in no way knowledgeable about actual science things. That being said I am amazed that in a random draw I actually managed to get a prompt that had to do with flowers lol. This is my contribution to the BakuHarem Collab! Please take a second to check out the other contributions here!
Warning: bad science, no protection, swearing, overs!mulation, accidental exhibti0som, intoxicated smut? idk sex pollen is a drug i guess.....
W/C: 3.5k
“Bakugou, dude. We should not-”
“Shut up Kirishima!” Bakugou walks through the sterile hallways checking every corner for signs of other people. “That bitch took my top spot with some bullshit flowers?!” He finally gets to the lab that was granted to you for your research. After winning first place, stealing first place in the UA university science expo. He walks into the observing lobby, looking through the large window to make sure you weren’t working in the lab after hours.
“Just keep quiet and listen for any one coming this way.” He walks over to the security door and holds his key card up to it, the light on the scanner turns green and he hears the dead bolt slide open.
Kirishima is lingering behind him, hovering in the doorway. He turns to Bakugou to talk him out of this again but his friend has already entered the lab. “Ahh geez.” He didn’t even wear any safety gear.
As the door clicks shut behind him, Bakugou stops to examine the lab. Several different species of flowers in full bloom behind temperature controlled enclosures. Some of them are recognizable; lavender, chamomile, and jasmine. “I thought it would smell like the perfume department, this fuckin place smells like heaven.” Guess it wasn’t a new shampoo she was using then.
He walks through the aisles turning his head this way and that, trying to find something, anything that he can fuck up without it being overtly obvious. He gets to the back corner of the lab and sees a piece of familiar equipment. “Perfect.”
*****
“He said WHAT?!”
Your roommate flinches at your reaction to her news. “He told Professor Aizawa that your ‘Viagra flowers’ are a joke to the science department and they should ‘wither and die’.”
You’re fuming. That fuck tard Bakugou, mister my shit don’t stink is ridiculing my research? “All that man knows is how to blow shit up! Just cause I beat him in the expo this year, he thinks my research is a joke?!” You stand up from the couch, pacing in front of it and you can’t decide whether to scream or cry. “Why did I ever like that twat?”
Cause he has wide shoulders, big hands and scarlet eyes that -
“Oh for the love of god shut up.” Screw your inner thoughts.
Ochako watches you pace, worrying in her eyes when yours line with silver and your neck flushes bright red. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you that.”
You stop moving and look at her, guilt flooding through you as she slumps forward. “Don’t apologize, I was talkin to myself babe.” She nods her head weakly and you stand up straight “I’m gonna go.” You walk to the door grabbing your coat and key card.
“W-where are you going?” Ochako follows you to the door and grabs your wrist gently. You turn to her and smile, she was always so sweet but you knew that if shit went down she would be right beside you, kicking ass.
“I need to blow off some steam, so I’m gonna go check on my ‘Viagra flowers’.” She huffs a laugh and let's go.
“Alright, don’t stay too late.”
You nod, put on your shoes and leave the dorm. It’s a bit of a walk to the building the lab is in and hopefully the cool breeze will calm your mind.
*****
As you walk into the building you are grateful that your professor is more of a night owl than most students. Considering how many naps he takes during lectures it is no wonder he can’t sleep at night. You contemplate going to his office to say hi but think better of it.
Don’t wanna end up venting about Bakugou to my professor of all people.
You walk down the hallway and notice the door to your lab is cracked. Not unusual, a lot of students from your class have been coming and going to see the different species of flowers and plants you are growing. Assuming someone didn’t shut the door behind them you take your phone out of your pocket to check the time. Out of the corner of your vision a quick flash of red and you walk right into Kirishima, Bakugou’s friend and one of your classmates.
“Hey! How- how's it goin?”
You take a step back, rubbing your nose from face planting into his giant chest. Does this guy eat boulders for breakfast? “Hey Kiri! Just gonna do some late night tests! You checkin out my garden?”
“Yeah! Flowers are pretty.” He laughs, it’s high pitched and obviously forced.
You take in his nervous appearance, the fact that he is still standing in front of the door and your mood sours.
“Where is he?”
Kirishima looks like he is gonna try and stall but one look at the fury in your eyes and his head hangs down. “He’s in the lab,” you rush past him and punch in the code to open the door. “I tried to talk him out of it!”
The door clicks shut and the spiky blonde huffs in annoyance somewhere in the back of the lab.
“I told you shitty hair, if you’re gonna keep a look out you have to stand outside.”
You clear your throat and his head shoots up. You walk over to him, taking note of all of the plants and equipment, taking note of anything that looks different. As you get closer to him you notice that he smells particularly good tonight.
Keep it in your pants idiot
“Really Bakugou?” You stop a few steps away from him, noticing the various disassembled parts on the counter top behind him. “What were you gonna do, break my extraction equipment and make it look like a malfunction? Are you a B-Movie villain?”
He stands up and you are reminded of how small you feel next to him, wide shoulders, arms barely fitting the t-shirt he was wearing, strong chest that tapers to a toned waist. He laughs and you look at his face. What I wouldn’t give to just lick from your navel to your neck.
“A B-Movie villain huh? That’s rich coming from the fanfiction cliché scientist.” He crosses his arms, your eyes quickly dart to the sight of his biceps flexing with the movement then back at him.
“Fanfiction cliché? What the actual fuck are you talking about?” You take another step towards him, softly inhaling his scent. Why does he smell so good?
He laughs at you again, the sound caresses your skin and you realize your feeling very, very hot. You drag your fingers through your hair, your eyes zeroing in on a bead of sweat running down the side of his face. When you lick your lips and shift to take another step closer a small part of your brain connects the dots. “What. Did. You. Do?”
Bakugou looks at you, noticing your flushed cheeks and eyes that show you aren’t quite your normal smart and sexy self. Reaching behind himself you hear the unmistakable sound of clinking glass, he grabs a beaker, an open beaker. “Just grabbed this from your equipment, I know how long it takes to extract this stuff. Would suck if it were to suddenly go missing.”
“You idiot! Do you know how potent it is in that form?!” You reach for it but he pulls the beaker out of your reach. “Why do you think I keep it enclosed? You have to close it up now!”
“Why should I?”
Honestly how stupid can this guy get?!
“Put it back in the enclosure first and I’ll explain it to you!” Your breathing is getting heavy, the closer you get to Bakugou the hotter your body feels. You lunge for him again and trip, he hurries to put the beaker on the table behind him and catch you. Put off balance from the position you both crash to the floor with him underneath you. Sighing in frustration you lift yourself up only to bump your head on the table, knocking over the beaker and spilling the extract over you both.
“Shit!” You scramble off of him and run to the door, pressing the exposure button and effectively locking it. You turn to Bakugou and back up trying your best to keep your distance. “Stay on that side of the room, if we’re far enough apart the effects won’t be as bad.”
“What are the effects?” The question is spoken so calmly that you almost convince yourself he didn’t speak at all.
“What are the fucking side effects!?” His shirt is soaked, sticking to his tanned skin. The outline of his chiseled body makes your mouth go dry. You look back at his face, his mouth twisted in frustration at your silence but no less attractive. The sharp angle of his jawline, pink lips slightly chapped, aristocratic nose, scarlet eyes that-
“Take a picture, it'll last longer.” Shaking your head to clear some of the fog in your brain, you focus on him again.
“It’s an aphrodisiac so obviously it enhances sexual desire.”
“Yeah-yeah, sex pollen I get it. But what else?” he rings out the bottom of his shirt, lifting it slightly and you avert your eyes.
“It is not sex pollen, I don’t even use the pollen of the plant.” the last part coming out in a mumble. “The aphrodisiac only works on people who are consenting adults that are attracted to each other.” You clear your throat.
Bakugou freezes for a moment and looks up at you, examining you. The flushed skin, short breaths, and how you keep as much distance between the two of you as the small lab provides.
“So why are you so far away then?” The smirk on his face is sinful as all hell.
Cheeky bastard.
“Surely I don’t have to spell it out for you.” Resisting the urge to turn your face away from him like a pouty child..
“HA!” The smug look on his face momentarily lifts the cloud of lust and replaces it with anger. “Of course you’re attracted to me, who wouldn’t be?”
���Well, aren't you a cocky bastard?” Hoping you're not about to embarrass yourself you take a chance and muster up some courage. Slowly walking up to him you notice that his forehead is glistening with sweat, his breathing heavy, ears and back of his neck flushed with pink. “Tell me, Katsuki. How are you feeling?”
A few steps and you can see his hands balled up in white knuckled fists, a few more his jaw clench and unclench. Once you are only an arms length away you can see him swallow harshly, Adam's apple bobbing, nostrils flaring. You push your breasts against his toned chest, the light friction causing a moan to escape your mouth, the sound going straight to his cock.
“I’m - I’m fine.” Bakugou clears his throat, the sound of his first name from your lips sweeter than it should be.
“Lookin a little flushed, you feeling hot?”
He doesn’t answer, his attention captured by the closeness of your body, your lips, the tops of your breasts peeking out of the v neck top you’re wearing.. He stops breathing when your tongue flicks out to lick your bottom lip.
“Cat got your tongue?”
On impulse his hands move to rest on your hips, eyes never leaving your lips. “What was the question again?”
“How. Are. You. Feeling.” you walk your fingers up his chest with each word before pulling his head down so you can whisper in his ear, the anger fading fast. “Katsuki.” You hear him growl, the sound reverberating through your core, then you're being picked up.
“I’m gonna ruin you.” Bakugou crashes his lips to yours, pressing you up against one of the walls and bracing you with one hand so that the other can wrap around your throat. “Fuck, you drive me crazy.” He bites your lip, licking it to soothe the hurt. “Smart, funny, sexy, beautiful.”
You whine at the words and grind against the bulge in his pants, your pussy throbbing with need. “Need to feel you touch me Bakugou.” He stops moving and you shift to try and grind against him again but he holds you tight, slightly squeezing the sides of your neck.
“What happened to calling me by my first name, baby girl?” Loosening his hand and crouching down as if to put you down you sputter out “Kat-Katsuki Please touch me.”
The feral grin on his face has your pussy drooling and you all but sigh in relief when he stands up straight and slips a hand under your shirt, cupping one of your breasts. “Oh god yes.”
“You’re so soft baby,” he pulls one of the cups down and rolls your nipple in between his fingers. “Take off your shirt, wanna see those pretty tits.”
Katsuki keeps playing with your nipple when you rip your shirt off, making short work of your bra and tossing it. As soon as the other nipple is in view he dives down to suckle it, his mouth hot. You throw your head back, grabbing fistfuls of his hair and pushing your chest out to give him better access.
He is merciless in his teasing, alternating between breasts, making sure to suck each nipple till they are both hard peaks. Kissing the top of your soft globes, your collarbone and neck, everywhere his mouth goes is left with a mark in varying shades of red and purple.
You grow impatient with him, needing to make him feel as good wanting to feel him with your hands, mouth, teeth.
“Wanna feel you too Katsuki.” you whine as he pinches one nipple while nibbling the other one. When you pull on his hair a little he groans but lifts his head, pulling both nipples with him before letting them go.
“What do ya wanna feel, baby girl?”
With all your inhibitions throw out the window you lean down and whisper in his ear. “Wanna feel you fuck me.”
You pull away and he quickly sets you down, you’re about to object when he takes his shirt off in one smooth motion then starts unbuttoning his jeans. You rush to follow, unzipping your pants and pulling them down, before you can pull down your panties he grabs your hand stopping you. “Leave ‘m on.”
Katsuki picks you up again before you can get a good look at his cock, but when it's pressed against you there is no need to see it. “Fuck you’re huge.”
He smirks at you, smug pride in his eyes. “Glad you approve.” Reaching a hand down he pulls your panties to the side and runs his fingers through your wet folds. “This all for me?” bringing his fingers up to show you the slick dripping down them he puts them in his mouth and sucks. “Gonna have to enjoy that tasty treat later.”
Your body is burning up, breathing is heavy as you both watch him drag his cock along your wet slit before pushing in. Your moans echo in the lab and neither one of you cares as Katsuki's cock drags against your inner walls until bottoming out. Right now is not the time for slow strokes, not with the aphrodisiac flowing through both of your bodies, so he starts a pace that has your ass slapping against his thighs.
“C-cumming!” You scream out before your body bows in on itself and you're creaming around his cock.
“Already?” a sideways grin on his face Katsuki starts moving you up and down in time with his thrusts, his cock reaching that much deeper. “Gonna cum for me again? Come on baby, wanna feel you milk my cock.”
Your mind is going blank, the only thing running through it is Katsuki. “Please don’t stop,” you dig your nails into his shoulders. “M Gonna cum again.” His thrusts go shallow and the head of his cock drags against your walls, hitting all the right spots.
You’re repeating his name endlessly, the only word that is in your mind then you’re cumming again. Your legs tense around his waist and your pussy clenches down hard enough that he has to stop moving or risk hurting you. He watches your face contorted in pleasure and starts thrusting as soon as he feels your orgasm subside.
“One more.”
Your head fuzzy, body limp from two orgasms. “I can’t!”
“Wrong,” Katsuki pulls out for a second, setting you on the floor and pushing on your back. You obediently bend forward grabbing the edge of the counter top and he wastes no time in rutting back into you. “You want me to stop?”
“NO”
“Then you got one more beautiful thing.” He sticks two fingers in his mouth, getting them wet then reaches around rubbing soft circles on your puffy clit. His other hand gripping your hip, before moving up and grabbing your shoulder using it as leverage to fuck into you harder.
“Come on, cum for me.”
You turn your head to the side trying your best to look in his eyes, yours tearing up at the overstimulation. “You cum too, fill me up Katsuki.”
“Oh fuck yeah.” Bending his knees he thrusts up into you and with the new angle, teasing circles being rubbed on your clit and the feral moans coming out of his mouth you cum one last time.
Fuckfuckfuckfuck
Katsuki cums after you, rope after rope of cum coating your fluttering walls.
You both stand there catching your breath. Katsuki pulls out and you whimper, “Oh don’t worry beautiful,” he picks you up again, walks over to a chair and sits down with you in his lap “not done with you yet.”
By the time you are spent both of you are exhausted and lost track of how many times either of you came. He helps you stand up, quickly pulling your panties back in place. “Don’t want you leakin.”
You giggle and pick up your clothes from the floor, he helps you get dressed and you both walk to the door. Making sure to check the air quality before leaving the lab you confirm that nothing is left in the air and unlock it. Before opening the door you turn to him opening your mouth to ask a question but he talks first.
“Let's go back to my room, yeah? I’ll help you clean up.” His voice rough from moaning and growling but you can see a small smile on his lips. Even though you know that the effects of the extract have worn off you can’t help but worry that he is still under their influence. Nodding your head you turn away from him again and open the door, walking into the lobby.
“I assume you're finished with the lab?”
You stop dead in your tracks, Katsuki bumping into you. “P-professor Aizawa?” Red hair peeks out behind him and Kirishima looks at you both with a nervous sharp toothed smile and red face. The fog of your memory clears and you vaguely remember hearing knocking on the window and door while you were… indisposed.
Katsuki steps in front of you, from the lack of red on his face or neck you know he isn’t nearly as mortified as you. “How long have you been standing there?”
The tired eyes of your teacher examine both of you. “Long enough.” He sighs heavily and pinches the bridge of his nose. “You are both to meet me in my office tomorrow morning.”
And just before you can’t get anymore embarrassed he walks out and says over his shoulder. “The labs aren’t sound proof, and these walls echo.”
@doinmybesthere @patchworkpuzzle @eyebagsbutglam @sugarspiceanddynamight
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readyplayerhobi · 4 years ago
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Jung Hoseok and the Magic to Happiness | 02
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; Hufflepuff Teacher!Hoseok x Reader
; Genre: Fluff, future angst, future smut
; Word Count: 6.5k
; Synopsis: An unexpected issue with your Ministry of Magic job leads to you taking the role of Transfiguration Professor at Hogwarts. It’s here that you meet your best friend’s younger brother for the first time in years, the Hufflepuff Head of House, Jung Hoseok. While you contend with seeing him once again, Hoseok tries to show you that he’s very much a man and no longer the gangly teenager you once knew.
; A/N: After almost three months of no writing...I finished this chapter :) I hope you enjoy...please leave me feedback in the form of comments or an ask. The long break has made me worry about a bit about whether people will even read my stuff anymore lol
Last Chapter ; Next Chapter
-
The next two months pass by with only a few growing pains in terms of teaching. You’d discovered pretty quickly that a group of twenty students could easily turn into pure and utter chaos. Particularly when one of them accidentally turns another into a turnip.
That had not been the best first-week experience if you were being honest.
There had been a few minutes when you’d been convinced 
But you were certainly getting used to everything. It was odd being on the other side now, being the one who commanded attention from the students. You had an almost desperate need to be liked by them at first, but the other professors had quickly dissuaded you from that. They were not your friends, and you’d learnt that if you gave them an inch then they’d take a mile.
It had been pleasant though, and you were certainly enjoying everything. There was nothing better than the smile on a student’s face when they got a spell right, with the knowledge that you’d been the one to teach them that. 
The comments you’d been told on your first note about the house stereotypes had also proven to be true. You’d never seen so many Slytherin’s chatting happily with Gryffindor’s and so forth. Whole friendship groups were made up of varying houses and none appeared to be left out. Nor had you seen any house related bullying as there had been in your day.
Once typical insults of a Slytherin being home to a Death Eater had vanished for the most part. The one time you had seen it, hurled by a Hufflepuff of all things, had resulted in complete outrage amongst all the students. It had warmed your heart to see the younger generations working in far better harmony than yours or your previous generations ever had.
Chaeyoung had become the equivalent of your work best friend, bringing her marking over to your office and spending time chatting happily with you. Seokjin had also become a close friend or at least as close as someone could get in only two months. The two of them were fascinating, coming from vastly different lifestyles.
Her family were practically magical royalty in France, though she’d moved to the UK whilst only a child to live with her grandparents after the deaths of her parents. As such, she’d ended up attending Hogwarts and had been in the year below Hoseok. Despite her initial French upbringing, she had no hint of an accent though she’d spouted fluent French to you when you’d queried her language abilities.
She also spoke Spanish, which had led to her initially getting a job as a translator at a magical exporting company. It had amused you thoroughly that it had been based in Devon, along the southern coast of England with France just over the narrow Channel Sea. Chaeyoung had laughed at the time, acknowledging that the mild weather was much nicer than the temperamental mistress you had to contend with here in northern Scotland. 
It hadn’t proven to her liking though, and she’d soon ended up applying for the vacant History of Magic position. She’d been quick to explain that she’d taken up an extra qualification in her chosen area and that she wasn’t just randomly picked. You knew from Jisoo that muggles had a different way to education, but there were no real universities here in the wizarding world. 
Chaeyoung studied hard enough and was very knowledgeable about her chosen area, so you didn’t see too much issue regarding it. And she was a popular teacher, helping to turn a subject that many would often find dull into something fun and interesting.
Seokjin, on the other hand, was older than you. He was 36, with a wife of ten years and two young sons. He’d trained in astronomy in the Ministry and had brought his skills to Hogwarts three years ago. You’d ended up bonding together over your dual experiences in the Ministry; both lamenting over the different departments and positions you’d had yet the same bureaucratic headaches. 
He was a joyful sort with a smile always on his face for you and his students along with a genuine passion for the stars and the universe. You knew that he made it a goal to read much of what the muggles were doing, his fascination with the fact that they’d been to space bordering on an almost obsession.
It was no surprise to you that these have been the two that you had ended up so close with. Both had the experience of working outside of Hogwarts and that seemed to make you all different from the other professors. Everyone else had interned here immediately after finishing before taking on their chosen role.
Jimin came from a long line of auror wizards and witches that stretched back centuries. This meant that he had extensive knowledge of the Dark Arts inherited from their wise teachings. His mother and father still worked in the Ministry, which meant that he’d slipped into the Defence Against the Dark Arts position with ease. 
Which was a good thing as it had remained an awkward position after the Second Wizarding War. It was a role that was often hard to fill as some many witches and wizards felt that it would be best to ignore that the Dark Arts even existed. If no one knew about the Dark Arts, and all the horrific violence and devastation that had occurred with them, then there wouldn’t be any need to defend it. 
That was, of course, a most ridiculous idea and Hogwarts had firmly resisted any such attempts to whitewash both the history and the concept of the Dark Arts. By not acknowledging what happened, and teaching to both understand why it happened alongside how to protect against it, then it would just happen again.
But it remained an exceptionally unpopular position due to the intimate knowledge of the Dark Arts required. To know how best to protect against the Dark spells, you had to know what the Dark spells were. 
You had experienced at least three professors during your tenure as a student.
That had all changed five years ago though when Park Jimin had finally taken over when his predecessor had packed it all in to go and study the famous dragons in Romania. The handsome silver-haired professor was young, but he had won over the staff of the prestigious school with his astonishingly good spellwork.
The fact that he had also made short work of their hearts was because he was also incredibly good looking, much to his benefit when it came to dating you were sure.
Jimin wasn’t just a pretty face though; he was the best dueller in the school. From what you’d been told, he had yet to be bested. Which honestly, was to be expected from someone with such a prestigious bloodline as his.
But not only that, he’d proven to be sweet and kind to his students with a backbone of steel as well. While there may be no true bad blood between houses now, Slytherin still garnered an air of suspicion from other houses even to this day. 
Given the preponderance of dark witches and wizards that the house had produced over the years, it was a well-earnt suspicion, unfortunately. Still, you didn’t believe that the bad decisions and choices made by people long ago should have any bearing on your current students; all of them born long after those terrible events.
Jimin had proven to be an excellent example of why you should never stereotype people based on what others had done. In your opinion, he was an exceptional teacher and had taken on the helm of the Defence Against the Dark Arts role with the clear mindset of not only helping to protect his students but also to try and prevent them from making poor choices.
It was a tough subject to teach as it meant constantly walking a narrow line while also steering students true through narrow and murky waters. There were plenty of students who might find themselves a little too fascinated in the concept of the Dark Arts, after all.
According to Chaeyoung, Jimin tried to combat this by making sure to teach them about the history of the Dark Arts. From what you understood, he held no punches in making sure they all knew the horrific acts of murder and sacrifice that had been committed to preventing students from romanticising a dark part of wizarding history. 
Not only that, but he made sure to teach about the most infamous dark wizards in history; the Death Eaters and Voldemort. This was all to ensure that they did not repeat the mistakes of the past. He took his role seriously, whether it was through spellwork or simply enriching the minds.
Despite his relative youth, you’d come to know him as passionate and hard-working with a true love for his students. Whether they be in Slytherin or Gryffindor. It was just one of the many things that you had come to grow to love about Hogwarts in your short time here so far, the way the school had adapted and grown so quickly.
Hogwarts was a castle that had been built from stone carved centuries ago and housed ancient treasures of the wizarding world, but the Battle of Hogwarts had been a turning point for many. No longer did it constantly look at the past with pure pride, and to many - ignorance, but instead looked to the future as well.
It sought to teach well-rounded wizards and witches that would enrich the community. Which meant it had attempted to modernise itself as much as it could. Of course, it didn’t match the sparkling modernity of steel and technology that the muggle world had developed over the last two centuries but it was improving itself and working to develop new magics that would mirror some of the advancements that the muggles had made.
Perhaps the only thing you’d found a little awkward to embrace was teaching itself. You’d been eager to begin but had quickly realised that teaching was much more complicated than you’d imagined. For all of the good things that Hogwarts was doing lately, it seemed odd to you that they didn’t even bother teaching their professors to teach.
A few discussions with some of the others had revealed that they also had this issue when they’d started. It seemed to have been easier for those who hadn’t spent too much time away from the school after they’d graduated but it had been a long time since you’d been schooled here. Teaching methods had changed and you’d struggled to maintain a healthy balance of actually teaching, answering questions to help students, having open hours to encourage students who were struggling to have extra tuition and finding time to mark the essays that you handed out. 
In short, it had been a very steep learning curve for yourself. Thankfully, your students had given you the benefit of the doubt, which meant they’d been very accepting of any mistakes you’d made. You’d also worked with the other professors to establish a good teaching plan for each of your lessons while also cross-referencing to ensure students weren’t loaded with too much homework.
It was more work than you’d expected, which made you understand how naive you’d been. But you found it to be satisfying work and the reward of seeing students learn and retain their knowledge throughout their lessons was better than anything you’d done in your previous job. And that was to say nothing about the pure wonder and joy on the faces of the first-year students when you had begun their education.
Underlying all of your experiences so far though was one Jung Hoseok. Whilst you’d become quick friends with Seokjin and Chaeyoung, Hoseok was a strange enigma to you. He was friendly and always willing to help you whenever you got confused over something or were feeling a little stressed.
His job as the Care of Magical Creatures professor meant that you rarely saw him during school hours. A large portion of his time was spent outside in the Forbidden Forest or in the custom-built buildings that housed many of the fantastical creatures that he cared for. You knew that he did have a classroom though. It wasn’t anywhere near yours but it held a lot of the smaller creatures that didn’t do so well in the Scottish climate.
Hoseok’s commitment to his job was commendable as he often spent a lot of hours outside. Which meant that as the months slowly shifted to winter, he was finding himself in the cold and rain a lot more often than not.
More than once, you’d spotted him outside when peeking through one of your classroom windows and noted him completely drenched as the rain poured down. It made you cringe each time you saw it, knowing that his robes would be heavy with water. But he never complained about it, even though he was the only professor who also had to work on the weekends.
On top of that, he was also busy with being the Head of Hufflepuff. From what you understood from your talks with Jimin, it meant always being available outside of learning hours for his House students. Whether they wanted to talk about a problem they had or simply needed advice, he was there to help them with whatever they needed.
It also meant that he had to attend every Quidditch game, and you wondered how he managed to cope with such a full schedule. You felt exhausted after a week of just your normal work but knowing how much extra he put in was mind-blowing. 
Despite this though, you’d noticed over time that Hoseok always made sure to be present for every meal in the Great Hall. And much like the first meal you’d shared at the top table, he always sat next to you. You hadn’t thought anything of it until Seokjin had casually mentioned one day while you’d been at Hogsmeade with him and Chaeyoung that he’d never sat in that place before.
His old spot was actually on the other side of the table, next to Taehyung and Jimin. Seokjin hadn’t even thought anything of his comment but it had caused you to pause, wondering why Hoseok had felt the need to change his position. At the time, you’d simply shrugged and pointed out that you’d known him when he was younger and that his sister was your best friend. 
It only made sense that he wanted to be there to help you out and make sure you were okay.
But that excuse started to falter when you thought about the fact that he never mentioned Jisoo to you. Hoseok didn’t mention anything of the past that you both shared. Instead, he would talk about Hogwarts now and your jobs or ask about what life was like at the Ministry when you’d been there. Those topics often led off onto little tangents and you’d both find yourselves chattering away with each other as the meals went on.
The others would get involved too when they could, but there was something...singular about Hoseok’s focus. And that was to say nothing of how he always made sure to walk you back to your quarters after dinner. There was never much talk that happened then, instead, the two of you simply enjoyed the architecture and decoration of Hogwarts as you found different ways to get back, the company exquisite in its silence.
A comfortable silence that you hadn’t found with many other people.
Chaeyoung was convinced that Hoseok liked you. You’d tried to debunk that theory by pointing out that he’d fancied you when he was younger and it was probably just the allure of an older girl who was more accessible to him than others. You were always around given your friendship with his sister and he’d probably just transferred his teenage hormones onto you at the time.
If anything, he was probably embarrassed about how obvious he was back then. Poor Hoseok had never been subtle in anything.
Despite your defence, Chaeyoung had simply given you a look that you hadn’t been able to interpret. Nor did you understand the subtle glances and smirks that she exchanged with Seokjin whenever Hoseok sat next to you at the dining table. It was like there was a silent conversation happening between the two of them about you, only you weren’t included in it.
Thankfully, you weren’t the type of person to be too influenced by other’s thoughts and opinions. So you didn’t let Chaeyoung’s opinion on the subject impact upon your burgeoning friendship with Hoseok. So even though there was a voice in the back of your mind telling you that there was something more, you ignored it and chose not to ruin the fledgeling friendship you had.
You’d felt a sense of relief though that Chaeyoung had been too busy with marking papers to attend dinner last night, which meant that she hadn’t been able to overhear your conversation with Hoseok last night. The two of you had been discussing his lesson plans for the next few weeks and what creatures his students were going to be studying.
He’d suddenly gotten an odd look on his face before grinning. If there was one thing you had learnt upon being back at Hogwarts, it was that Hoseok’s smile was perhaps one of the prettiest things you’d ever seen. Which was why you’d smiled back at him immediately, even though you had no idea what he was so happy about.
But he hadn’t made you wait and had instead asked if you were tonight. You’d acknowledged it and confusion had been written all over your face but he’d just given an enigmatic shrug. All he’d said after that was to meet him at the entrance of the Forbidden Forest an hour after dinner. 
Which was why you were now standing in the dark. Your robes were wrapped tightly around you but it did nothing to stop the way you shivered, jaw tight as a cold wind rushed through the trunks of the trees before you. Part of you wanted to run back to the castle if only to grab your winter coat, but you didn’t want to look like you’d stood Hoseok up. 
Though you did wish he’d turn up quicker rather than later.
Huddling under your cloak more, you clasped the edges together with your hands and pushed it up to cover your mouth and nose. It didn’t do a whole lot against the cold, but it was better than being exposed to it. Even though the wind wasn’t strong, it was still enough to cause your robes to flap, the sound loud against the quiet of the grounds.
The only other sound right now was the wind as it howled through the Forbidden Forest, making the already dark and ominous area look even scarier. Even though you were now an adult, there was an underlying fear of the forest before you. Perhaps it was because it had been firmly ingrained in you as a student that this area was off-limits or something.
Still, you wouldn’t want to go walking around in it on your own anytime soon.
The sight of the trees suddenly moving ahead of you made you gasp quietly, body freezing in position as you squinted to try and see what it had been. You knew that the forest was full of many magical creatures; not all of them gentle and kind.
Swallowing hard, you stayed in place to try and avoid attention, gaze skittering around as you tried to find that shape once more. A branch cracking caused you to flinch, your hands tightening into fists around the material of your cloak and you had to clench your jaw to stop any noise from escaping.
The black shape formed once more ahead of you and you almost shrieked in fright, getting ready to run away until you saw a sudden flash of brighter colour. Frowning, you let your hands unclasp themselves until you realised it was a yellow scarf and realisation flooded through your body.
“Bloody hell!” You cursed, the syllables being spat with indignation. Hoseok looked up in surprise, his own eyes widening in surprise before concern etched itself onto his face when he saw the dual outrage and fear on you. Striding forward, you met him just as he was about to cross over the boundary of the trees onto the grounds of the castle and poked at this chest, a scowl on your face.
“You didn’t think to warn me you were going to be coming from the forest! Merlin’s beard, I almost ran away because I was afraid it was something that was going to hurt me.” Hissing at him, you realised belatedly that you had to look up to him to do this. Damn him and his growth spurt.
Still, he at least had the decency to look a little sheepish.
“Sorry, I didn’t think it might seem a little scary. I was just coming back from checking on the centaurs; I haven’t been able to meet them in a while and wanted to see if they were okay.” His explanation was logical but it still made you scowl.
“Why aren’t you carrying a light or something?! Do you always just gallivant around the Forbidden Forest in the dark? Aren’t there dangerous things here?” You pepper him with the questions quickly, each one causing his brow to rise higher incrementally. It’s a good job that it’s dark because you don’t notice the way the corner of his lips quirks up in amusement at your tirade.
“I don’t use one in there, not normally. I know my way around very well. I have worked in this forest for years now. But I do have lanterns dotted around in case I need one and I can always use a lumos spell, like now. I figured you wouldn’t want to journey in the dark.” At that, he pulls his wand out of a pocket in his robes and mutters the spell, the tip lighting up with bright white.
Narrowing your eyes at the sudden influx of light, you’re momentarily startled by just how handsome Hoseok looks in the light. It casts an almost blue glow to him, his normally sun-kissed skin looking paler than you’ve ever seen it before. The shadows on his face only serve to highlight the sharp angles of his features while his eyes almost glitter.
It’s only then that you realise you’re staring, quickly averting your gaze away and focusing them on your hands instead. At that moment, another harsh wind blows through and you shiver in response, your shoulders lifting as you try to curl in on yourself.
Gripping your cloak once more, you’re too distracted to notice what Hoseok is doing. The only sign is the light going a little wonky for a few moments before you’re startled by the sudden feeling of softness on your neck.
Letting out a small ‘eep’ of surprise, you jerk away only to see Hoseok staring at you with wide eyes, his scarf no longer wrapped around his neck and instead being held out to you. The Hufflepuff colours look washed out in the odd light and you pause, giving him a confused look as you glance between the scarf and him.
Brows raised, he lifts the item before giving you a slow smile. “You’re cold. You can wear this if you want. It’s not as chilly in the forest but I don’t want you to get poorly because of it. I should have warned you, sorry.”
It seems like all he’s done is apologise so far and it makes you feel bad, causing you to nod your head and take the scarf from him. Wrapping it around your neck, you immediately feel a little warmer and you can’t help but take a deep inhale of the scent woven into the soft fibres. It’s a more concentrated form of what you get to smell every meal time; citrus and something with a slight hint of spice.
For a second, you wonder if it’s a cologne it’s bought himself or if perhaps it’s something a woman bought for him. It suits him, either way.
“Are you ready? You don’t have to come if you’re feeling uncomfortable or anything…” Hoseok trails off, biting his lip in an almost nervous way that makes you feel a little odd. Pushing the thought away, you hum and glance behind him into the forest. Your curiosity was too much and so you nodded firmly, giving him a gentle smile before gesturing for him to start walking.
Without another word, he turns around and begins to walk once more. You notice casually that he’s following a path cut into the forest, the ground level and even compared to the wildness all around you. Alongside the sound of your boots on the dirt, you realise that there are a few other noises all around you.
The gentle hoot of an owl is overwhelmed by a shriek far away, causing a chill to run up your spine. Shuffling forward a little quicker, you almost reach out to Hoseok as a tinge of fear takes over. As if he can tell, he turns around and gives you a concerned look.
“What was that?” Whispering, you glance around and wonder if you should talk loudly. Hoseok looks in the same direction as you do before shrugging slightly.
“Could be anything. This forest is full of creatures, both magical and mundane. Might be a bat or could be something else. Don’t worry though, there’s not usually anything dangerous around this part of the forest. It’s too close to the edge and the creatures that can do the most harm prefer to remain deep within the forest.” It’s almost casual the way he slows to walk alongside you, giving you the safety of his presence but you notice it all the same.
Not that you comment on it, of course. But you appreciate it nonetheless.
Giving him a noncommittal sound, you continue until he takes a sudden turn off the path. The forest floor is dense with foliage and tree roots, causing you to trip a few times. Hoseok helps you along, reaching you to hold your arm to keep you upright when you trip over one too many roots and you get the sense he’s enjoying this.
Maybe it’s because he lets out a soft chuckle when you swear loudly, scowling down at the deeply embedded rock that you’d accidentally kicked. Despite the fact your best friend’s little brother is leading you deep into a scary, dark forest, you don’t feel any concern about him. What could be in the forest, sure, but not him.
He gives off a sense of security that surprises you. All those years ago, Hoseok had been the perfect example of an annoying little brother to Jisoo. Always irritating her and doing things with the sole purpose of being a pain, which in turn meant doing those things to you as well. But now he seemed dependable and you got the sense that you’d want him with you if anything bad happened.
“Okay, we’re almost there. Now, I need you to stay very calm and don’t make any large or sudden movements. You might scare her.” Staring at him in alarm, you suddenly realise that you’ve not even questioned what he’s wanting to show you. Not that he’d have told you, you’re positive of that, but his instructions make you feel a little uneasy.
Upon seeing your face in the light of his wand, he gives a small smile and rests his hand on your arm reassuringly.
“Don’t worry, I promise, you’re going to like this. You’ll understand what I mean.” Frowning at him, you watch as he starts forward once more and realise he’s heading into a little clearing. Sighing deeply, you realise that you don’t want to stand there on your own so you follow him slowly, almost hesitant to see whatever he’s bringing you to.
You swear, if it’s one of those obscenely large spiders that’s supposed to live in this forest then you’re going to jinx him with something he’ll still be suffering from in a year.
The clearing is small and almost circular, though the position of some trees makes it seem a little broken in places. Long grass that is almost bouncy cushions your feet and you wonder if flowers would grow in the daylight, the canopy of trees above broken and allowing more sky through than elsewhere.
During the day it would get a lot of sunlight, but at the moment you couldn’t help staring in awe at the moon as it glowed brightly, it’s full body visible against the black of the sky. A few stars twinkled serenely alongside it, looking peaceful and creating a beautiful image. 
A pale, ghostly colour catches your attention from the corner of your eye and you find yourself pressing to Hoseok a little closer. His back is strong and solid against your hands as you tense in concern, peeking around him to try and catch what it was.
What you see causes you to gasp out loud, letting go of Hoseok’s robes abruptly as you take a wide step away from him to get a better view.
Long, sinewy legs move through the forest in an almost dainty manner, picking their way through the undergrowth with care and precision. There’s almost no sound as the creature moves towards the clearing, only the softest rustle of leaves that can’t be avoided. It’s fascinating how quietly it can move given its size and you wonder if it’s some magical ability that allows that.
Within moments, the shape coalesces into a clearer image as it passes through the edge of the trees on the other side of the clearing. A silver coat practically glows under the moonlight, giving the creature an ethereal feel that makes you feel that it’s not even real. That you’re just seeing an apparition instead of a real animal.
The horn on its head is long and spiralling, ending in a deadly point while the pale white mane and tail flow in elegant waves towards the ground. Golden hooves paw softly at the grass, glinting slightly.
A unicorn.
“Merlin’s beard…” You whisper, pressing a hand to your mouth before looking at Hoseok. “A unicorn...that’s a unicorn!”
They were rare creatures, even rarer now due to being hunted over the centuries by both muggles and wizards. Muggles thought them a myth now while you knew the rumour of the powerful properties that unicorn blood had. You hadn’t even known the Forbidden Forest had unicorns in them.
“It is. I haven’t named her, seems a little wrong to name her. They normally don’t really like men but I found her when she was injured two years ago. She was dying and I helped nurse her back to health. Unicorns have great memories and we’ve kind of become...friends? Or as much of a friend as you can be to one.” He finishes, smiling as he watches the unicorn snort almost in agreement.
Her eyes are a deep black in the moonlight but you note they look almost friendly and kind. Hoseok’s hand on your back pushes you forward slightly, causing you to start and look back at him with wide eyes.
“Move slowly...hold your hand out to her so she can see it and smell it. Be careful and like I said...no sudden moves. You’re a woman so she’s more likely to accept you anyway, but she’ll let you know if she’s not happy.” Gulping, you nod and take a deep breath. Letting it out slowly, you try to stop the trembling in your limbs.
Whether it’s from excitement at finally getting to see your favourite magical creature in the flesh or fear of being gored to death by that dangerous horn, you don’t know. But you follow Hoseok’s words, trusting him to be right.
Slowly, you walk forwards with your hand out, palm side up. Each step you take, you stare intently at the body of the unicorn to try and catch any movement that might be viewed as hostile. Given she had four legs, there was no way you could outrun her but you’d at least like to say you had a head start.
Despite your worry, she makes no threatening moves. If anything, she seems cautiously curious; her ears pricked forwards towards you and her eyes remaining focused solely on you. Not a muscle in her body moves, only the chilly wind blowing through her mane and tail.
Finally, you’re almost within touching distance of her. But instead of carrying on, you stop. Something inside you tells you that it’s a good idea to do that, to let her come to you and accept you. So you remain standing there with your palm held out to her, watching her closely.
Nostrils slightly darker than the rest of her body flare wide a few times, likely taking in as much air as she can to smell you. It isn’t enough though and she slowly extends her neck out, her refined head stretching out until you can feel the hotness of her breath. Not moving, you let her investigate until finally, she takes one careful step forward and presses the velvety softness of her muzzle into your hand.
Smiling, you let her increase the pressure before turning your hand and gently stroking her. There’s a moment of almost curiosity in her eyes, not that you can tell what a unicorn is feeling, before she lets out a huff of air and leans her head into your touch, obviously enjoying the feeling. 
Your smile turns into a wide grin as you run your hand along her face slowly, letting her get used to the feel of you before you gently scratch at her chin. Almost instantly her ears flatten and you feel a pang of panic, but she just lifts her head and lets out a nicker of contentment, giving you a better position.
“She likes you.” You hear from beside you, and you turn to see Hoseok patting the unicorn’s neck.
Turning away from you momentarily, the mare lets out a soft whinny as she looks behind her into the forest. Frowning, you crane your head to try to see what she’s looking at. Soft footfalls being and you look at Hoseok in confusion, tilting your head at the sight of his grin.
Before you can ask him what’s going on, there’s a high pitched neigh and the mare turns her head back to you, butting at your hand gently. Glancing to her side, your jaw drops once more and you can’t help but squeal lightly.
A foal is standing next to her, it’s coat fluffy with baby fur and a beautiful golden that contrasts completely from its mother. There’s no horn on its head, only a tiny nub that will one day grow long and tall. Gangly legs look too long for its body and the short, fuzzy tail make you coo in delight as it flicks it from side to side eagerly, those big eyes staring at you as it almost dances in place.
Looking at its mum, you almost ask for the permission with a hand raised in the foal's direction and you could swear the unicorn almost nods. Slowly, you move towards the foal and stroke along its short neck, marvelling at how soft and fluffy it is. The foal snorts, its entire body wobbling from the movement and you giggle in delight, completely awed by the sight of them both.
“She had this foal only a month ago, so he’s still pretty small. But he’s a sweetheart and so friendly. As you probably know, he’ll keep that gold coat for two years before paling out to silver.” Hoseok says casually, still stroking the mare and smiling at her fondly. 
For a few minutes, you’re too busy playing with the foal to pay attention to his words but they finally sink in.
“What do you mean, as you probably know?” Neither of you had discussed unicorns so far during your mealtime talks, so you didn’t know why he’d think that. Sure, you’d been taught about unicorns in school but that had been so long ago and it hadn’t even been a full class on them. 
Your love of them had meant you’d learnt much more about them, absorbing all the information you could find in books when you were a teenager. The fact that you were finally standing here, stroking not only a unicorn but also her foal was something that you’d always wished you could do. Given how rare they were though, you’d never expected it to happen.
“Well, they’re your favourite magical creature, right? Or they were, anyway.” He frowns slightly, unsure if he’s got something wrong and you simply stare at him for a moment.
Had he remembered that from when you’d been at Hogwarts? Given your love of them, it was only natural that he’d known about them back then given how often you’d spent time at his house to have sleepovers with Jisoo. But you’d have thought he’d have forgotten all about that by now.
Jisoo didn’t even remember this as you’d both grown over the years, the obsession of teenagers mellowing out. Unicorns remained your favourite magical creature, but you didn’t hold that deep passion that you did back then. The fact that Hoseok had remembered stunned you into silence for a moment though, causing you to frown down at the foal.
“Yeah...yeah, they are. I...I mean...thank you. For remembering and showing me this, this is amazing. I’ll never forget this, Hoseok.” You’re not entirely sure how to thank him properly, because you don’t know of anyone else who could show you a unicorn like this.
Before you can say anything else or Hoseok can respond, you’re both distracted by the way the foal lets out a squeal and butts his head into you lightly before jumping away. Taken aback, you watch him for a moment for he does it again, his impossibly slim legs wobbling slightly as he trips on a rock.
“He wants you to play,” Hoseok says softly, smiling as he watches you both. Glancing to him, you raise a brow before grinning back at the baby unicorn. Tilting your head at him, you purse your lips before jumping forward and raising your hands in claw motions. Almost immediately, the foal leaps forward before darting back to you and you giggle, already planning your next move.
Yeah, okay, you might be thirty-three years old...but you were going to play with the baby unicorn.
422 notes · View notes
dramioneden · 4 years ago
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do you know of any fics where there’s a pregnancy scare or Draco accidental gets hermione pregnant?
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Dramione Unplanned Pregnancy Fic Recs 
Hi Nonnie, Sorry it has taken me soooo long to reply to this ask. To answer your question, yes I have a few (76) “accidental”/unplanned pregnancy Dramione fic recs to offer - because Draco and Hermione seem terrible at planning pregnancies. So I’ve broken this down into ones I’ve read & recommend and ones on my TBR you might want to give a try. I also categorized the fics into Teenage Pregnancies, Wartime Pregnancies, “Adult Draco and Hermione forget contraceptive” Pregnancies, Marriage Law Pregnancies and “Hidden” Pregnancies. So here is the ultimate guide to Dramione Accidental Pregnancy Fics, hopefully there is something on this list that will satisfy your ask. Happy Reading!
Teenage Unplanned Pregnancy:
Recommended Fics
Snow Storm by kblynne
8th year Post-war healing coping, Head Boy and Head Girl, teenage pregnancy.
Always Mine - A Dramione Fanfiction by SamadiW
8th year, Head Boy and Head Girl. The unplanned pregnancy is more of a secondary/later arc. Main arc on development of relationship between Hermione and Draco. Mixes the right amount of angst with the right amount of sexy.
Fics on my TBR that you might want to try:
From Venice with Love by jamieblye
In Private by acro acro
Locked In by goldhorse
His Sweet Dream by Supernerd22
I Didn’t Know by TriDogMom
Of All the Idiot Things by Lady Imara
Unbreakable by cleotheo
What Happened After The Canaries by Silver Lioness
Wartime Unplanned Pregnancy
Recommended Fics
Broken Chains by Leave It At That
Another Dramione, where Harry and Ron escape, but Hermione is left behind. As Draco and Hermione are forced together by a very perverted characterization of Voldemort, they realize they must rely on and trust each other to survive Voldemort’s demands. Forming a tentative trust and rare magical bond, together they set about playing the roles expected of them until they can find escape.
Resistance by GracefulLioness @graceful-lioness
Very well written, 7th year divergent. Instead of spending the war camping with Harry and Ron, Hermione spends it camping with Draco after they escape a battle together.
The Importance of Breeding by Jessiy  @jessiyl
Interesting twist on “what both sides of the war decide to do about the dwindling wizarding population”. Voldemort comes up with a “perfect mate” spell - guess who Draco’s perfect mate is?  
Manor of Conception by psiphifan
Harry and Ron, escape without Hermione. As punishment to the Malfoy’s for letting Potter get away, Draco is given Hermione to “breed”, thereby sullying his pure blood line. As dark as the set up is, Draco and Hermione adjust to their predicament quite adeptly. A “wartime subversion” read that hurts a bit … but climaxes a lot).
Fics on my TBR that you might want to try:
The Gift of Joy by biscuitsforpotter @biscuitsforpotter 
I Spy by gnrkrystle
The Power of Love by cleotheo
The Edge of the World by phlox
Balaur by two_ff
Tergeo by LadyKenz347 @ladykenz347
Consequences of War by NJ Coffee Queen
The Letter by RN2017
Haeres Genitus: The Begotten Heir by little miss moonlight
“Adults who forgot a contraceptive” - Future fic Unplanned Pregnancies
Recommended Fics
Precious Things by herbeautifullie @herbeautifullies
Beautifully told in a series of vignettes that take place every Christmas over a number of years. The author conveyed and developed Draco’s introspection as he falls in love with a family he never expected or wanted. Well written, emotional character/relationship study.
Liking by Ladyoneill
An adult affair between Draco and Hermione leads to adult conversations (with some input from Narcissa).
Fics on my TBR you might want to try:
A Year and a Day by Mistrus
Best Laid Plans by persephone_stone @persephonestone​
Careless by wish123
A Series of Very Bad Decisions by damnedscribblingwoman @fearsometinywit​
Unexpected Gifts by cryptaknight
Unintended Consequences by rainsrabble @rainsrabble
Knocked Up by dolphinroxy
The Side Witch & The Gift and My Witch & Her Gift by SeptimaBode
Once Upon a Night by longdistance
Ordinary People by inadaze22 @inadaze22
Surround Me by Taintedembrace
The Sweetest Downfall by xXBeckyFoo
A Wonderful Caricature of Intimacy by Countess of Abe @countessofabe
Beautiful Mistake by pinayflava90
One Night Stand with Consequences Series by ruthy4vrsmoaked @ruthy4vrsmoak-ed
Constellations in Flourish and Blotts by MarshmellowMcGonagall @marshmallowmcgonagall
Gasping, Talking, Screaming, Crying by Gette
Heaven Forbid by empathaique
In the Heat of the Storm by xxDustNight88 @xxdustnight88
whispered through the trees by notawitch2580
Back to You by NJ Coffee Queen @mnem85
Circle by wanderlustfaery
Freedom’s Consequence, Rapture’s Reward by CelticSass
Marriage Law (but still unplanned) Pregnancy
I read and recommend all three fics in this sub-genre:
Desperate Marriage by x.Chrissy.x
Nice twist on the Marriage Law trope. After breaking up with their current fiancés when they find them cheating (Ron x Astoria), instead of letting the Ministry choose their spouses for them, they choose each other. Note: I don’t want to give spoilers away, but I think it should be noted that though it’s not tagged, be aware that a couple loses a pregnancy in this. As someone who has lost a pregnancy before, I was not put off by how it is handled, but found it emotional and relatable. There is an HEA and there is a happy healthy pregnancy and I did enjoy the fic completely even the emotional part.
Ninety-Five Percent by HufflePuffMommy @hufflepuffmommy
Draco and Hermione are 95% compatible - who would have thought? ;) I really enjoyed this marriage law fic - has courting quality to it, through all the tension and angst (and denial).
An Unconventional Escape by Ariel Riddle @ariel-riddle
Loved this twist on the “marriage law”. Voldemort has won and his wizarding world is facing population problems due to infertility of purebloods. He enacts a new law that purebloods can choose captive muggleborns as spouses. The only muggleborn for Draco is Hermione - and she’s suspicious, but clever enough to figure out his dastardly persona is more pretense for show.
Secret Child/Hidden pregnancy trope: Not only was the pregnancy an accident, it was kept a secret from Draco.
Recommended Fics
Amongst the Mango Trees by ViolaMoon @violamoonfanfic
Post-war, while in a happy affair with Draco, Hermione discovers his family has him engaged to Astoria, hours after she finds out she’s pregnant. She decides to leave and start over in Australia with her parents.
Breathe by RZZMG @rzzmg
In spite of a loving affair with Hermione, Draco feels obligated to see through his engagement with Astoria. But when he runs into a pregnant Hermione months after they break-up, he must dig deep to be his own man and not his father’s.
Seven for a Secret by Musyc @willhavetheirtrinkets
Anonymous sex during Beltane, has Draco putting pieces together when he encounters an 8 year old spitting image of himself.
Unspoken Words by LilithShade @lilithshadefanfic
Post-war, Future fic. Hermione and Draco have a one night stand. Nine months later, Hermione shows up at St. Mungo’s in labor. Draco is the doctor on duty.
Always You by Emerald2402
When there is trouble in paradise between Ron and Hermione, Draco just happens to be in the right place at the right time with a shoulder for her to cry on. A couple years later, the child she brings to St. Mungo’s with a fever, bears a striking resemblance to him.
The Trouble with Love Series by bentnotbroken1 @bentnotbroken1fanfiction
8th year Hogwarts setting. Accidental pregnancy is secondary arc, post-war coping/healing and Dramione affair primary arc. Note that the first in the series: The Pitfall is complete, but the second in the series is still a WIP (as of time of post 11/2020).
Fics on my TBR you might want to try:
Consequences of War by bentnotbroken1 @bentnotbroken1fanfiction
Aparecium by LadyKenz347
An Awfully Big Adventure by NJ Coffee Queen @mnem85
The Best of Me by MrsRen @mrsren
Choosing Destiny by AkashatheKitty @akashathekitty
Let There Be No More Curse by lexiatel @lexiatel
Nowhere Left to Run by FallenInDreams @fallen-in-dreams
Rose by longdistance
Second by LadyAlinor @ladyalinor
Seventeen by smithandbarrowman @smithandbarrowman
The Silver Dragon by KittenShift17 @kittenshift-17
Webs We Weave by mayghaen17 @mayghaen17
What’s in a Name by ImSlytherinatHeart
Full Body Control by lun27
Growing by the Minute by lozlol
Heartbreak and Horntails by AtHomewithWords
The Taste of Honey by Buzzy
390 notes · View notes
xiaomoxu · 3 years ago
Text
Lucien - Intimate Date
⚠️ SPOILER ALERT!! ⚠️
A date from CN server which hasn’t been released on EN server yet. Might contains some spoiler. Happy Qixi Festival~
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Translations under the cut~
-
Whistle: Speaking of which, Mr. Lucien...
When the "whistle" spoke, I did not hear him clearly. He had to knock the steering wheel twice before I came back to my senses.
MC: Yes, what are you talking about?
Whistle: I said that this mission goal is rare to invite you to travel with. You must seize the opportunity and strive to completely gain his trust.
Whistle: You must record his destination, what he ordered on the train, and who he met.
MC: Yes, I remembered it.
My answer seemed to make him dissatisfied, and he looked at me warily through the rearview mirror.
Whistle: MC, It can't be... Are you tempted by that Mr. Lucien?
With a stern expression only face, I sat up straight up steeply.
MC: What are you kidding about, how can I be tempted by that kind of person?
Whistle: Hmm, you just have to know it.
There was no more words in the carriage, and the car continued to drive towards the train station. Looking at the bustling city outside the window, I tightened my lips.
How could I be tempted by Lucien?
If there is someone who fascinates me, it should...
I lowered my head and glanced at the book in my arms.
"Awakening" Snow fox.
ㅡThis "Snow Fox" who can guide me and give me strength first.
The first time I read Mr. Snow Fox's article, I seemed to be drunk, and all the confusion and perplexity I had been dispelled.
He used his pen as a knife to attack injustice and pave the way for peace.
He is a lonely walker with a torch in his hand, walking in the long dark night.
I am a small streamed firefly attracted by the hot flame, chasing this light silently.
Finally, with all efforts, I joined the organization of Mr. Snow Fox
Although I haven't seen his true face yet, but he once asked someone to forward me a book to encourage me.
MC: You are shimmer, you want to hide under the darkness.
I opened "The Awakening" and mumbled out a line of text on the title page—this was also a personal message from Mr. Snow Fox to me.
MC: I will never disappoint Mr. Snow Fox.
The car stopped by the train station, I put the book back in the secret compartment of the suitcase, and carefully sorted out my cheongsam.
The Whistle opened the door for me.
Whistle: For the last, check the mission target situation again.
MC: Okay.
Whistle: Who is your goal?
MC: Lucien.
Whistle: Who are you?
MC: Lucien’s blind date, which is a rich lady who has lived abroad since she was a child and returned to China for less than half a year.
Whistle: Your task.
MC: Monitor Lucien and find out his purpose of leaving Loveland City this time.
Whistle: Very good. One more thing, if there is a suitable opportunity in this trip...
Whistle: Kill him.
MC: Assassinate Lucien?!
This order was a little unexpected, and I couldn't help being taken aback.
Didn't the previous organization say that Lucien maintains the balance of the Loveland market and asks me to focus on surveillance and not to move?
MC: Why did you suddenly kill Lucien? Was it a temporary decision by the organization?
Whistle: What do you ask this for?
MC: Because this is contrary to my previous actions, so I want to confirm again...
Whistle: This is a private order from Mr. Snow Fox.
MC: Mr. Snow Fox...will give me a private order?!
My eyes widened in surprise, and when I wanted to ask a few more questions, a horn suddenly interrupted our conversation.
At the intersection not far away, three black cars approached us one after another.
The black goat logo on the front of the car was plated with a dazzling silver in the sun, like the cold light on the tip of a knife.
The original noisy street became extremely quiet, and only the tires made a slight rubbing sound on the ground.
The convoy drove slowly across the road, and after such a long distance, I still saw the clear profile face of the mission target in the car window at first glance.
It’s Lucien.
Whistle turned his face and saw Lucien's motorcade, and he frowned.
Whistle: You don't need to be too nervous, I will pretend to be an ordinary tourist at the next stop and sneak into the third-class carriage to meet you.
Whistle: Remember what I just said, once you find the opportunity to do it, use the transmitter in your suitcase to contact me.
Whistle: Okay, it's time to play, Miss MC.
MC: Mmhm.
I took a deep breath and got out of the car with a small suitcase.
The door of the middle car across the street also stopped at the same time. A group of black subordinates lined up, and one of them opened the door.
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The first thing that catches my eye is a hand holding a cane. The fingers are white and slender, and the nails are neatly trimmed, like the hands of a literati.
Only the thin calluses at the knuckles indicate that this hand can hold a pen or a gun.
The owner of the hand, leaning on a jade cane, stepped out of his right leg first.
With his figure, it may be more suitable to wear a slim dress, but even if the gown is tightly wrapped, you can still see the straight and slender legs.
The silk gown bends like flowing wrinkles between his knees, and the dark lines on the satin surface reflect the shimmering light as he moves.
He raised his other hand again, took a trilby from the hand of his respectful subordinate and put it on his head.
In the silence, Lucien got out of the car slowly.
It was so quiet all around, it seemed that he was the only protagonist of this silent film.
And after Lucien's gaze slowly looked around, he finally stopped at my face across the street at this moment.
In an instant, his indifferent eyebrows were stained with the temperature of the early morning, and the lip line also bends in a pleasing arc.
Lucien: MC.
MC: Mr. Lucien
Obviously his appearance is so harmless, three points gentler than the teacher in the school.
But when I think of the rumors about this "Mr. Lucien" in the market, I still can't help but feel a palpitation.
He held back his subordinates and walked towards me with a smile.
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Lucien: Sorry, did you wait for a long time?
MC: Fortunately, I also just arrived.
I took a step forward, trying to maintain my innocence and asked
MC: Mr. Lucien, where are we going this time, why would you think of inviting me with you?
Lucien: What we are going to is a very beautiful place. As for why I brought you...
Lucien: I think a smart girl like you shouldn't be surprised.
MC: You praise me like this, I'm so embarrassed.
MC: Now that Mr. Lucien decides to keep the sense of mystery, I will keep looking forward to it.
I reddened my cheeks pretending to be shy, but my heart was beating wildly because of the other party.
Whistle hurried to the trunk to help me take out the luggage, and Lucien also leaned down and naturally took the suitcase from me.
Then he straightened up, smiled and stretched out his other arm to me.
Lucien: Let's go.
MC: Okay.
I happily wrapped his arms, leaned my body against him-and walked towards the train station.
There is still a short distance from the start of the train. As VIPs, Lucien and I have already arrived in the luxury carriage in advance.
And after the whistle sent my luggage onto the train, he left immediately. Before leaving, he didn't forget to wink me a warning.
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Lucien leaned on the sofa. He glanced at the back of the whistle through the window and whispered.
Lucien: Miss MC, your driver...
Subordinate: Mr. Lucien.
The subordinate's knock on the door interrupted Lucien's words, and he frowned slightly.
Lucien: Come in.
The subordinate walked in quickly and whispered something in Lucien's ear.
I tried to prick my ears, but I could only hear a few scattered words-"clue", "check", "eradication"....
While listening, I calmly poured myself a cup of scented tea.
As Lucien listened to the report of his subordinates, the corner of his mouth moved.
Lucien: Don't worry, continue to follow him.
Subordinate: Did you mean...
I don't know if it was my illusion, Lucien's eyes seemed to turn to me.
Lucien: If you want to do it, do it thoroughly.
Lucien: After all, an excellent hunter wants to lure the "Snow Fox" out of the hole, and it can't do without enough delicious bait.
Snow Fox!
Suddenly hearing these two words, my fingers trembled, and the scented tea almost spilled from the cup.
Lucien: Miss MC, what's wrong?
MC: No, nothing, my finger was accidentally scalded by the teacup for a moment.
Lucien: Let me see.
MC: It's okay, it's just hot.
But Lucien had already held my hand, his strength was very light but I couldn't refuse it.
The cool fingertips rubbed my red fingertips, bringing out an ambiguous itching.
He observed it carefully for a while and saw that there was nothing serious, so he pulled a white silk kerchief from his arms and wrapped it around my finger.
Lucien: The walls of this porcelain cup are relatively thin, so you will remember to put something on your hand next time you drink hot tea.
MC: Alright, I remembered it.
Lucien smiled at me, and lightly shook my fingers wrapped in the kerchief.
When he spoke again, his words were directed to his subordinates.
Lucien: Follow the previous plan. I hope to hear some good news when I get to the station.
Subordinate: Yes Sir.
At this time, the sharp siren finally sounded, steam gushing out, and the steel wheels began to move forward steadily.
The people on the platform waved their hands, saying their last blessings and goodbyes to their loved ones, lovers, and friends.
Amidst the hustle and bustle, there is also the persevering cries of newsboys, one after another, like cicadas in the late summer, so ear-piercing.
News Boy: Sell ​​newspapers! Take a look! Mr. Snow Fox's new work "Dark Night Flame" is on the market!
--
Before I knew it, I had been on this train for three days.
During these three days, I was not restrained and could walk around in the train at will. The scenery on both sides of the train was beautiful, and the companion accompanying me was considerate and gentle.
If it is said that the only flaw is that there is still no intelligence.
MC: Lucien...
This man is indeed too perfect and too tricky.
I sighed and looked at the figure on the platform unconsciously from the gap between the curtains.
The train will stop next to a small station, and Lucien is talking to the owner of the food stall, he looked gentle and humble.
He paid the money and was about to return to the car with the paper bag. Suddenly, a boy with a cart next to him slammed his feet and slammed forward, exclaiming.
Seeing that the cargo is about to collapseㅡ
Lucien's eyes were quick, and he held the cargo box with one hand and the boy with the other.
Lucien: You all right?
Boy: You are?! sorry! sorry!
When the boy saw that he almost hit a noble person, he trembled with fear and apologized again and again.
Lucien: Don't be so nervous, you didn't hit me either. Go ahead.
Boy: Thank you sir, thank you sir!
The cargo boy ran away without looking back, pushing the front of the car.
-It seemed like a small accident, but from my perspective, I clearly saw the cargo boy quickly stuffing a note into Lucien's hand when he left.
Why did Lucien use this method to deliver messages?
I watched Lucien's calm and composed face, and suspicions gathered in my heart. I raised my head  and met his gaze.
MC: ...!
I drew back abruptly, avoiding his sight.
Subordinate: Mr. Lucien?
Lucien: Nothing, go up, don't let the kids wait in a hurry.
After a while, Lucien appeared at the entrance of the carriage. He smiled and raised the paper bag to me as if nothing happened just now.
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Lucien: Today is Chinese Valentine's Day, there happens to be a fruit seller in the station, wanna try it?
MC: Huh, today is Qixi Festival?
I couldn't help but froze. The spirit has been tense recently, but even the days have been somewhat forgotten.
Lucien: No wonder you forgot, it was my fault that kept you in the train for too long.
Lucien: But it doesn't matter if you forget these festivals, I will help you remember them.
When he made a promise, his brows were dazzling and his tone was solemn, as if he really was a caring beloved.
Lucien sat next to me and handed me the paper bag.
The small and lovely fruit inside exudes a fragrance, I picked up one and said with a smile to Lucien.
MC: "Begging every year is a coincidence in the world, and there are too many inhumanity in the world", my pleasure.
MC: Hmm... delicious!
MC: Mr. Lucien, do you want to taste it?
With a smile, I picked up another dessert and handed it to Lucien's mouth. He fixedly stared at me for a moment and bit it with a smile.
MC: How is it, isn't it delicious?
Lucien: Well, this is the first time I have eaten this kind of dessert. It is sweet and slightly salty, with a crunchy texture, and it tastes really good.
Lucien: What makes me even more happy is... You really like the taste of this hometown.
He just bit the word "hometown" a little bit harder, and it made my breath stagnate.
MC: I don't understand what Mr. Lucien's words mean.
Lucien: I remember that Miss MC who came back from studying abroad. Both your parents are abroad, right?
Lucien: It just so happened that my subordinates went to a country where Miss MC's parents, so I asked him to inquire a little bit.
Every time Lucien said a word, he leaned forward by a point, and the distance between us was closer.
His breath was burning, with the sweet fragrance of fruit, but it caused a chill in the back of my neck.
Lucien: In his reply to my telegram, he said...in the local area, there has never been such a family.
Lucien: So, Miss MC.
His hands are still cold, and when it touch me, it's like touching rare fragile objects.
His fingertips went from my brow bones, to eyelashes, to cheeks, and finally gently twisted away the fruit crumbs from the corners of my lips.
Lucien: Can you tell me who you are?
Silence flows between us. The train has not started yet. What can be heard is the shouting of the platform not far away, as well as the breathing and heartbeat close at hand.
As Lucien's breath enveloped me, there seemed to be a flame igniting in the place where he had just touched. I bit my lower lip and tried not to shift my sight.
MC: Is the answer to this question important to Mr. Lucien?
Lucien: Of course it is important.
MC: Why?
My question made Lucien raised his eyebrows in surprise.
Lucien: Haven't you noticed MC? You are a very important person to me.
MC: Haha, Mr. Lucien's words really flatter me.
tugged at the corners of my mouth stiffly, but my mind was spinning.
What does Lucien mean by "not found"? What does "very important" mean?
How much did he find out about my identity?
With Lucien's ability, as long as he catches any slight loophole in my words, it will be enough to destroy everything.
No, I can no longer answer any questions from Lucien.
It just so happened that the train whistle sounded again, and I put my hands behind me and pretended to pull the tablecloth inadvertently at the moment the train started.
The tea cup on the table swayed twice and poured in response. The remaining tea in the cup was spilled on me and Lucien.
I took the opportunity to sit up, lowered my head to help Lucien wipe his clothes, and apologized to him again and again.
MC: Oh, Mr. Lucien, I am sorry!
Lucien looked down at the tea stains on his silk shirt and smiled.
MC: I'm okay, but you have water stains on your body, so go back and clean it up.
As a pardon, I nodded and left immediately.
Lucien: By the way, I asked the train restaurant to prepare a candlelight dinner tonight, and I hope Miss MC will appreciate it.
MC: With Mr. Lucien's invitation, I will definitely be present in full dress.
Lucien: I believe MC, no matter how you dress it up, it will look good.
Lucien lifted the teacup on the table, seemingly inadvertently added another sentence.
Lucien: After all, such a good day as Qixi Festival cannot be easily let down.
I was sent back to my car by Lucien's subordinates. The moment I closed the door, I felt my strength slip away and plunged into the mattress.
MC: (sighed)
Being vigilant all the time makes me exhausted physically and mentally. Only when I’m in my car, I can breathe a sigh of relief.
My identity will be revealed sooner or later, and once exposed, would Lucien behave like a merchandiser who is pushing goods, showing me a touch of kindness?
Do I really have a fluke with Lucien like the whistle said?
I opened my eyes and slowly spread out my palms.
In the palm of my hand is the little note I just stole from Lucien.
There was a line written on it: Snow Fox is in the car, be careful.
At the moment when I saw these words, all kinds of scenes flashed past my eyes quickly.
Lucien: After all, an excellent hunter wants to lure the "snow fox" out of the hole, and it can't do without enough delicious bait.
Lucien: Haven't you noticed that you like ink? You are a very important person to me.
Could it be that... Lucien discovered that I was an organizer and wanted to use me as a bait to draw out the "Snow Fox"?!
Since this is the case, should I act first to be the best-obey Mr. Snow Fox's order and kill Lucien.
Snow Fox , Lucien...All the emotions in my heart are like a tangled mess. I can't help but reach out to the suitcase by the bed.
Across the wall of the box, the "Awakening" lay quietly there.
After a long time, I took a deep breath, sat up from the bed, and started preparing for the action tonight.
I first took out the wireless transmitter hidden in the suitcase and told the whistle that Lucien and I would have dinner in the dining car tonight.
Then quickly took off the pink dress and put on a purple cheongsam. Opened the secret compartment of the suitcase, took out a pistol from the inside and tied it to my thigh.
While putting on makeup, there was a knock from a subordinate outside the door.
Subordinate: Miss MC, Mr. Lucien is already waiting for you in the restaurant.
MC: Got it, tell Mr. Lucien that I will be there soon.
I put the lipstick back in the box and was about to get up when the light from the corner of my eye suddenly swept over something on the table.
It was the white handkerchief Lucien wrapped around my finger when I lied about being scalded.
When I returned to the car, I put it on the dressing table and didn't move it again.
Lucien's handkerchief is as simple as his clothes, and there is no other pattern except for the embroidered mark of his name on the corner of the handkerchief.
The moment I saw the handkerchief, Lucien's abrupt eyes suddenly appeared in my mind.
Why does a rumored "Mr. Lucien" who is obsessed with power and cruel, has such a pair of calm and sober eyes?
Obviously in my imagination countless times, only the "Mr. Snow Fox" in my mind would have such eyes.
MC: Mr. Lucien... is it really just Mr. Lucien?
I was shocked by the nonsense that I blurted out, and I took a step back abruptly.
I was a little flustered inexplicably. Just about to put away the handkerchief, my fingers suddenly felt strange bumps on the silk surface.
MC: Hmm??
I looked down and found that beside Lucien's name, there was a Morse code embroidered with silk threads of the same color.
I held my breath and fumbled for the code with my fingers, and finally found that they formed a words.
MC: My shimmer?
The setting sun outside the window was sinking, and the fluent sunset glow was gradually replaced by the night.
The lights are lit on each train, and the train shuttles through the mountains and forests like a golden dragon.
When I arrived in the restaurant, Lucien was still writing a letter at the table by the window.
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When he saw me, he put away the half-written letter and smiled at me.
Tonight, instead of wearing the daytime gown, he changed into a slim-fitting suit, and his temperament became more capable and chic.
MC: Sorry to let Mr. Lucien wait for a long time.
Lucien: Compared to Cowherd who can solve the pain of lovesickness only once a year, I only waited a while for "Little Weaver Girl", considered to be very lucky.
Lucien: Have a seat
He opened the table seat for me, and I took a seat happily.
Lucien: How have you been on the train these days?
MC: Mr. Lucien seems to ask me this every day.
Lucien: Do you think I'm long-winded?
MC: No, this is your thoughtfulness, I like it very much, and I have had a good time these days.
MC: Even too comfortable, I don't want to get out of the train
Lucien: This is bad.
MC: What's wrong?
Lucien: After eating this dinner, we are almost arrived at the station. If MC don't want to get off the train, I can only use other methods to get you off.
I quickly glanced at the closed door of the dining car, settled, poured a glass of wine, and continued to laugh with Lucien
MC: What other method does Mr. Lucien want to use?
Lucien: It depends on what approach Miss MC likes.
MC: Me, of course I want more....
Before I finished speaking, the ground suddenly shook! A hot air wave overturned the railroad tracks and hit the carriage!
Before I had time to react, I felt like the sky was spinning.
The next second, I fell into a warm embrace.
Lucien: Ugh...!
Lucien held me firmly in his arms, but his whole body was knocked to the ground by the air wave.
The world in the carriage was upside down, and Lucien's letters and official documents on the table were scattered all over the
The ornate decorations turned into fragments, and the wine in the glass was spilled on the brocade like drips of red blood.
The disaster came without warning, and the steel giant leaned on the rails, uttering a heavy mournful cry.
I turned my face to look at the mess on the ground. The crying and screams from the front and rear carriages made my brain go blank.
MC: What exactly is going on...
Lucien: The train was blown up. It should be coming for me.
Lucien took me up with one hand, and with the other hand drew the pistol from his back.
The explosion plunged the train into chaos, and Lucien's subordinates was at the other carriages and it was too late to arrive.
He turned around and looked at the exit of the carriage warily, while admonishing me.
Lucien: MC, If the other party wants to cut the grass and roots, it is estimated that they will take the opportunity to return to the restaurant to confirm my life and death, you have to be careful....
The words after were swallowed back, because a gun was hitting his abdomen at the moment.
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MC: Don't move.
Lucien's gaze moved up from the muzzle a little bit, fell to the hand of my gun, and finally stopped on my face.
For the first time, his eternally calm eyes rippled, and his lips opened slightly, and then he pressed tightly again.
In the next second, a smile suddenly appeared at the corner of his mouth.
Lucien: Miss MC wants to kill me.
Lucien's somewhat helpless expression made me feel embarrassed, as if I was just a little girl making trouble with her lover unreasonably.
MC: Why are you laughing?
Lucien: Nothing, the other side of MC really surprised me and couldn't help but laugh.
I glanced at him and opened his tie with the muzzle of my gun.
Then freed his other hand and groped his waist and chest roughly to make sure that there were no other weapons or wiretapping on him.
And Lucien opened his hands very cooperatively, as if he was at my disposal.
After searching, I glanced at the door again before turning my gaze back to Lucien.
MC: Mr. Lucien, before killing you, I want to ask you a question.
My fingers slowly touched his heart, and said word by word with an voice that only the two of us could hear.
MC: (Do you believe I will be shimmer?)
Lucien's eyes were suddenly bright, and he also answered me with his mouth.
Lucien: (From beginning to end.)
Bang!!
The moment his voice fell to the ground, I shot.
Lucien also slowly fell to the ground under the gunshot.
MC: ....
Holding the gun tightly, I kept my eyes locked on the doorway of the squeezed carriage.
Finally, after a while, a figure appeared at the door.
MC: Whistle..
Whistle: MC? You didn't...
MC: I was lucky, and it happened to be blocked by the sofa when it exploded.
Whistle: Y-Yes...what about Lucien?
MC: Didn't you hear the gunshot just now, I've finished him.
MC: Whistle, You seem to have expected this explosion?
The whistle glanced at Lucien, who was motionless, then glanced at me, his mouth suddenly grinned from an arrogant angle.
Whistle: Of course, this is my plan.
As he said, the hand of the whistle rose sharply, and the black hole pointed straight at me.
Whistle: Because you and "Snow Fox" both have to die.
However, before he had time to pull the triggerㅡ bang! A gunshot sounded faster!
Lucien: Finally bit the bait.
Lucien, who was lying on the ground, opened his eyes. He slowly sat up with a gun in one hand, looking at the whistle for an instant.
Whistle: You..
The man's eyes were full of things, his shrunken pupils were printed with the figure of me and Lucien standing side by side.
When he was about to attack again, the sound of footsteps came from both ends of the dining car. Lucien's subordinates who had survived the explosion finally rushed over and subdued him to the ground.
Subordinate: Mr. Lucien, are you okay!
Lucien: I'm fine.
Lucien: Apart from this person, there must be other pests in this train. Clean it up immediately.
Lucien: Also, immediately contact the headquarters and the nearest hospital, check the conditions of the front and rear carriages, and take all passengers out of here.
Subordinate: But you...
Lucien: Hurry up.
The subordinates' throats stagnated, and they didn't dare to defy him, dragging the seriously injured whistles towards the two carriages.
There were only two of us in the carriage at this moment, and Lucien turned his eyes back to me after watching the last subordinate leave.
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Lucien: I just saw, Miss MC's acting is a little bit flamboyant, and she still needs a lot of polishing.
I didn't reply immediately, just stared at Lucien firmly.
At this moment, Lucien's face was strangely clear in the twilight, eyebrows, lips, cheeks... finally merged with "Snow Fox".
MC: ...Mr. Snow Fox's acting skills are outstanding, and the little girl is deeply impressed.
Lucien smiled deeper, and he carefully helped me straighten my temples.
Lucien: When did you discover that the whistle had a problem?
MC: From the beginning. When he faked "Snow Fox" orders and asked me to assassinate you, I began to doubt him.
MC: But at that time I was still not sure about his motives, then...
I took out the handkerchief, and picked up the letters scattered on the ground—the writing on it was exactly the same as the writing in "The Awakening" message.
MC: Did you also find out that there is a problem with the whistle from the beginning?
Lucien shook his head.
Lucien: No. I only found out that he had betrayed the organization and he also found out that I was Snow Fox.
MC: Then when you first got in the car, you said you wanted to get rid of "Snow Fox"....
Lucien: In addition to the whistle, there are other inner ghosts.
Lucien: I arranged this train and wanted to use this excuse to catch them all.
Lucien: But I didn't expect these people to blow up the train in order to get rid of me.
This is a journey of life and death. In the confrontation between righteousness and evil, everyone's identities are constantly changing.
Everyone feels that he is a hunter and the other is a prey. Lucien the Snow Fox. Whistle the traitor.
ㅡOnce Lucien dies on the train, the entire Loveland City may face a bloody storm.
When Lucien said this, his voice became more and more apologetic.
Lucien: I insisted on taking you in the train, because I was afraid that you would be silenced by the whistle while I was away. As a result, I almost made you fall into danger with me. Sorry.
MC: I am not afraid of danger, darkness must accompany danger, I just... a little angry.
Lucien: Why are you angry?
I blushed, and finally threw the gun to him, hold my breath to say the words.
MC: You... the big liar who always talks around the bush!
Lucien laughed loudly. The first time I heard him smile so clear, it was like the early morning when the clouds saw the sun.
He took me to the side of the carriage, supported the window with one hand, and dexterously take off from the carriage.
MC: What are we going to do?
Lucien: There is much more to be done.
Lucien: "Snow Fox" can disappear, but Lucien still has to exist.
Lucien: We have to continue this scene until the darkness fades.
He stretched out his hand to me outside the train. I held his hand and felt the solid strength of his arm.
MC: You are talking around the bush again.
Lucien: Hmm... Would you like to hear me say something less convoluted?
MC: Of course I do.
The glow in the distant mountains has long since faded, and the long night is approaching, and the wilderness will rise from the starting point of the firefly.
Lucien's eyes are brighter than stars and fluorescent lights.
He smiled and took me out of the trainㅡ
Lucien: It happens MC for me, it is indeed a very important person
Lucien: I am very satisfied with the result of this blind date, how about you?
--
Notes from me: You’ve done reading~ thank you for always read Lucien’s date~ I really love the interaction between MC and Lucien in this date, the way Lucien always want to protect MC and MC who wants Lucien’s kindness, is really make my heart fluttered. Again, thanks a bunch for everyone, HAPPY QIXI FESTIVAL!  (*≧ω≦*)
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theplushmaker · 4 years ago
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Oki since someone asked for the Silver headcannons I'll post them, there's quite a few so I hope you enjoy!
Please let me know if I should put a warning
• Silver loves to look at the night sky to see the stars since he came from an apocalyptic future where ash and smog covered the sky
• Silver was originally part of Sonic's time but was transported 200 years into the future by Mephiles to insure the (rewritten) events of Sonic 06
• Silver enjoys botany
• Silver was taught English by Mephiles
• Silver knows seconds and days but has trouble when it comes to hours, weeks, months, and years
• Silver at first had trouble understanding how birthdays worked
• Silver was a lot shorter when he first met Sonic due to malnourishment, making him look like a 10-year-old (despite being 14)
• only Silver remembers the events of Sonic 06 due to Mephiles' interference
• Silver had to ask Sonic what certain words meant ex: parents, mom and dad, sister/brother, etc, etc, the first time he asked Sonic what family was, Sonic was, understandably, confused then worried, afterward, Silver had asked Shadow instead only to get the same results (albeit less obvious) so now he only asks if he can't figure it out on his own
• Silver is used to hot temperatures due to the lava and fire in the apocalyptic future
• Silver gained the ability of foresight, albeit weak, (after Sonic 06) and is only able to use it when meditating (this is so that Silver doesn't have to appear JUST because "oh the future's in danger and he has to prevent it" like in the games)
• Silver can not time travel, that was all Mephiles' doing (^)
• Silver has a fear of fire (pyrophobia)
• Silver can not tell when someone is being sarcastic and will take everything someone says literally, Charmy learned this the hard way when he told Silver to "throw the bucket of water at Sonic" Sonic was knocked unconscious with Tails panicking, safe to say Charmy learned his lesson and was later grounded by Espio when he found out
• Silver's first "food" when Mephiles sent him back was ham sandwiches
• when Shadow had to keep an eye on Silver, (along with Rouge and Omega, due to him getting a head injury because Shadow "accidentally" kicked him and Rouge felt it was their mostly his responsibility to take care of him till he recovers) he saw Silver laying on the ground outside, when Shadow walked over Silver looked at him with big eyes saying "it's so small" with the tone of an amazed child, upon closer inspection Shadow found out that he was referring to a caterpillar he found eating a leaf, Rouge was there recording the whole thing
• Silver managed to make Shadow smile when he first saw snow and started acting like a child on his first snow day
• Silver never told anyone about the events of 06 after the "time-line reset" thinking it was best left forgotten (that and he's afraid of what everyone will think should he tell them that he helped a man, who no longer exists, almost end the world)
• Silver sleeps at 12:40 but will wake up at 4:00 IN THE MORNING just because he's still not used to the concept of time, the only reason why everyone knows this is because one-time Sonic let Silver stay the night at his and Tails place, and Tails ended up finishing a project at 4:33 AM the boy walked out of his lab expecting for Sonic and Silver to be asleep, only to get the absolute daylights scared out of him when he finds Silver (trying to but shh!) Reading a book at the kitchen table, Silver fell out of his chair and Sonic came down running (but not without falling off his bed and hitting his head hard) to check on them, after that they told everyone of Silver's "messed up" sleep schedule
• Silver is illiterate but is trying his best to learn how to read without anyone knowing, so far no one suspects a thing
• Silver has quite a bit of pain tolerance given the fact that Knuckles dislocated his shoulder once and Silver didn't even flinch, even after they fixed it by taking him to a doctor
• Silver can not stay in one place for too long, given the fact that he traveled all over the place in the apocalyptic future, it was only a given that the habit never died, of course, Sonic and co can keep him from leaving by simply keeping him busy, this has helped greatly with surprise party's
• Silver's first "language" was just a mix-mash of 40 other languages
• if Silver doesn't use his psychokinesis he can end up building up too much energy for his body to handle, so what happens if he can no longer handle it you may ask? Chaos, absolute chaos, he ends up acting like Charmy on a sauger rush and Sonic when he has coffee, his abilities go haywire and he doesn't even know it, the worse part is, the only reason he did stop using his psychokinesis is because he made a bet with Shadow to see who can go the longest without using their abilities, Rouge, of course, recorded the whole thing, along with Omega, no one has let him live it down since
• the gold bracelet things (what are they even called?) Silver has can store excess energy and it can store a lot, (so combine that with energy build-up)
• Silver has nightmares of when his primary caretakers were killed, (PTSD?) Though sometimes it would be about Blaze, Amy, Sonic, Shadow, or all of them, sometimes it's them getting killed or them leaving him once they remember or find out about the events of 06, which is why he tries his best to act as normal as everyone else, though sometimes it's about Mephiles telling him things, he tries to bury those memories
• Silver didn't know it at the time but he and Mephiles had a father-son relationship before he realized Mephiles was using him, it saddens him knowing that he might never have that type of relationship again
• Silver sometimes reminds Shadow of Maria with how he acts when he sees/ learns something new
• Silver, Shadow and Sonic have a brotherly relationship, Silver being the young oblivious brother, Sonic being the carefree middle brother, and Shadow being the strict older brother
• Silver may act like a child most of the time but if someone gets in his way of survival, he will go stone cold
• Silver's boots are made of metal so they weigh quite a bit, of course, the only reason why everyone knows this is because when Shadow "accidentally" knocked him unconscious, he, along with Rouge, tried to drag him inside only to find out his boots weighed him down and had to be removed, this lead to the discovery that Silver was underweight, (they left his boots outside, covered by a box because they didn't want to bother trying to move them inside)
• Amy and Vanille were the first to find out that Silver had quite the sweet tooth, he likes marshmallows best
• Silver gets vocabulary lessons from Amy while taking cooking and health lessons
• Vanille makes sure that Silver eats whenever she gets the chance, like a worried mother
• Silver's teeth are surprisingly healthy, just not the cleanest... with a little bit of red staining (though people assume that it's because his gums bleed and not because he ate something he shouldn't have) Amy had to teach him how to brush and had to remind him to brush every night until it became a good habit of his, his teeth are also pretty sharp for a hedgehog (I wonder why)
• due to multiple reasons, (take a guess) most of Sonic Co think that Silver didn't have a great upbringing, with most of them assuming that he had strict parents and lived during a famine in a dry/hot area that was prone to violence, which they aren't wrong but they are?
• with Silver's fear of fire, one would think that he and Blaze didn't get along, but the opposite is true, Blaze keeps using fire at a minimum when he's around and if she did use it then she'd give ample warning time and space before she does it, in return Silver stays close to the ground so he doesn't "trigger" her fear of heights
• Silver does not know anything about romance, so when he starts to suddenly feel odd around Blaze, ex: abnormal heart rate, weird feeling in his stomach, warm cheeks, etc, he asks Amy about it, (mostly because she's been teaching him about health) and she gets excited and tells him about love (she's secretly cupid, fight me)
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ashintheairlikesnow · 4 years ago
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The Crying: Savvie on Trial
CW: Whumper POV, intimate whumper, sadistic whumper, video of whumpee's child, intense child therapy recording, referenced shock collar and past drugging, emotional/physical abuse, trauma response, child re-enacting trauma
Note: CW for whumper’s justifications for their abuse in internal monologue
@comfy-whumpee‘s Jax Gallagher finally escapes Savannah Marcoset’s obsession with him, with two children in tow and nearly a decade of abuse and trauma written in his mind and on his skin.
Determined to ensure his children will be protected from the Marcoset family’s potential revenge, Jax goes to court one more time - taking down Savvie, her uncle Isaac, and most of his children in the process. 
Savvie sees the second trial, with its ironclad evidence against her, as Jax’s betrayal of her love for him. When a video of their daughter is shown in court, Savvie and Jax are both surprised - and react in very different ways.
While Savvie does not interact with her children, her thought process is... intense. And so is a brief video depicted in the piece.
---
Even Savvie understands she can't charm her way out of this one.
It was one thing to be in her early twenties and beautiful, full of innocent misunderstandings, to tell anyone and everyone that she hadn't known he wasn't above-board (she had), she had thought she was doing a good thing letting him speak to his father (now that was a mistake), he was her best friend and her rock in the hard days after her parents' loss and she simply couldn't remember life without him (that was never a lie). 
The earnest sincerity in her tone as she explained to her prison therapist how hard she was working at understanding the consequences and working to improve herself had simply been more believable then than it could ever be now. 
You can’t very well have the love of your life abducted twice without it becoming a very difficult decision to defend.
This time, she understands that batting her eyelashes can't make her seem like simply another victim of all these terrible cruelties of the world. She is not going to leave the walls of prison once she walks inside. Not this time.
 After all, the second time, she had had her uncle abduct him out of his own father’s apartment and steal his passport and every other form of ID he might have.
Isaac had drugged him, the Marcoset family employees had stolen his passport and identification, kept him slurred, floppy and hardly conscious on a private plane ride that took just a little less than eight hours, drugged again, and driven to her house to wake up tied to a chair in her practice room, right back where he belonged.
He probably didn’t even enjoy the luxury of the plane. It occurs to Savvie now that she never once asked him if he remembered any of the time he’d spent on the plane with Isaac, if he remembered anything between the men who grabbed him and Savvie bringing her violin up to welcome him home.
You can hardly blame that whole re-abduction thing on being young and foolish, and you definitely can't blame it on the indiscretions of youth when you are thirty years old.
Thirty-seven.
She dismisses the thought.
She is clearly only thirty. She doesn't look a day older, and Jax looks… younger, she thinks, mildly surprised at the realization. Younger, with more weight on him and a set to his jaw that she hasn't seen since… since the first day of his return, when he spit insults at her before she drugged him again, and he was so lax, so pliant, and she had known he would marry her one day from that first moment he curled back up and fell asleep with her hands on him. She just hadn't told him that, at first. 
No one here understands how thoroughly Jax belongs to her, not even him, not anymore. He no longer wears his wedding ring, though she thinks there's still a hint of a tan line there. Maybe not. Might just be a scar. 
He's changed his pretty platinum piercings out for duller metal, plus added back the ones she'd taken out of him herself. They're defiant, those bits of rebellion she never allowed him put back in place. She pictures when she took them out, the way he kept his eyes down for it, swaying a little from what she'd given him in his water. Felt a thrill run up her spine at the memory, his soft slurred voice murmuring Yes, Miss Savvie, one of her favorite sounds in the world. 
He looked better the other way. Her way.
All his scars are definitely still hers, though. He can't forget her. He can wear new rings in his ears and eyebrow and lip and he can dress in grubby low-class clothing that isn't even tailored, but every single scar is a scar she has memorized, and he can’t erase them. They all belong to her, and he knows it, and he knows his body is hers and has been and will always be. 
The scars around his neck - her scars, the little circular spots she wants to trace with her fingernails over and over until he begs her to stop, until she forces him to hold his breath, to get that faraway look in his eyes, until he leans in for a carefully cultivated kiss - give too much away. He can't hide them all. 
The ones on his hands, too, are hers, although those are mostly accidental. There are some on his back, subtle, hidden by his button-up shirt and suit jacket where he sits, so close to her and impossibly far away. 
The back, she did on purpose, dragging nails through his skin until blood welled up, streaks of red that stained her manicured nails, sitting on his lower back leaning over him, her hair a waterfall that brushed his skin. She can remember clearly the way he fought to stay still for her, remembers the pain she gave him with his daughter soft and sweet and so very new in a bassinet only a few feet away, how he'd bled from his palms and stained her sheets in his effort to keep himself quiet enough not to wake the baby.
She's never going to forget that. 
Unfortunately... neither will the jury. 
He's banking on it, she thinks, throwing everything out there that he might have kept hidden otherwise. Everything she thought he wouldn't want his father to know, or to be televised… he gets up on the stand, or he sits next to his lawyer, and he gives away all of it. 
He tells them about the wedding, the judge who knew her family and married them with her uncle Isaac and his family as witnesses and guests. He describes, detached from what clearly horrifies the jury, how during his worst injuries, she made the simple task of giving him the pain medication he needed into a game of how good he could be to earn it. He even tells them, with a strange sort of tone in his voice, about the day she told him she was pregnant with Isabella. 
On the stand, he says the day she had him open the box to find the custom cake with CONGRATULATIONS, DADDY written in frosting was the worst day of them all.
And yet… and yet, after sitting up there telling the jury, and the witnesses in the courtroom, and the judge how unhappy he was… still, he won’t let her anywhere near her son and daughter, not even to say goodbye. 
He bleeds out all his pain, just to keep her from seeing her own children. Just to keep her from having access to what belongs to her. 
Her daughter, her son… him.
Her husband, the love of her life, handing every scar and welt and night they spent together over in his bid to keep her from ever touching him again. It’s cruelty, is what it is. She had never known how cruel he was until he ran away from her. 
He had stared at something far away while he related the story of her uncle dislocating his shoulder and breaking his arm (which, that had been a little much, but she’d made sure Isaac never did it again!), his weeks of pure perfect helpless dependence on her. 
She had watched him speak, remembering the way he leaned forward those days when she made sure that dinner was soup, taking each bite from the spoon she held in her hand. The thrill of leaving him just a little bit hungry, that much more willing to be sweet the next morning.
He belongs to her, and he is going to take everything away. 
His scars, the story written on his body of how she loves him, will be her ruin, this time. Well, that, and the existence of the children he has already turned against her. The children she has already been court-ordered never to see or speak to again. She won't even legally be their mother anymore, he and his devious fucking lawyer are even scheming to take her rights as their mother away. Those children are hers, and how dare he take them, when they were hers first.
He didn't even want them, when they were born - and now he acts like he is the only parent they have. 
The worst part, though...
He won't look at her. It's fucking infuriating.
She tries to catch his eye, now and then, and fails. She looks at him with her head tilted to make her hair fall against her cheekbone when he enters the courtroom with his hair all chopped off again. 
He ignores her. 
She shifts in her elegant, tailored dress - no low neckline or sheer fabric, all sobriety and seriousness to show she will be a model defendant. She wears a silver locket she bought years ago, based on an old Victorian design - a lock of his hair is inside it, curled just so. 
He still doesn’t look, even though he knows his hair is in the locket, she showed him when she put it there. She’d cut it while he was sleeping, and showed him when he woke, to see his face go still, his eyes raise to her face only with effort. If she’s honest... she wanted that hesitation, that uncertainty.
In a deep ocean blue, her pale skin and bright, wide blue eyes are set against her dark brown hair, pulled carefully back each day. She looks stylish, and still modest.
She looks innocent.
 It just... doesn’t matter anymore how she looks. The problem is that she isn’t innocent, and no amount of cultivating an image can overcome the evidence against her. But at least she’s trying. 
Now, Jax… She's pretty sure he wore that same gray suit to her last trial. It had hung on him before, too big for how underweight he was. She had liked the way it sharpened his cheekbones, then. Yes… it's definitely the same suit.
She would remember, of course - she had spent the whole trial, all those years ago, staring at him, wondering if she would ever see him again. He'd mostly looked at the floor, then, but she had gotten his eyes on hers a time or two, seen him stare after her as she was led from the courtroom. She had spent the time mourning his loss, before he ever truly left, and then coming to the certainty that she would never allow him to be taken away from her, not forever. No, they were made for each other, meant to be together forever. She had been convinced his father had tricked in, told him lies about her. 
Even after she knew, deep down, that he wanted to stay gone, she knew just as firmly she would never allow that.
Planning to bring him home again, before he ever stepped foot on the plane that carried him across the ocean away from her, had filled all her days and nights. It had made prison seem so short, just a pause before she could bring him home. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
If he would only look at her... 
She tries to catch his eye, but he never looks at her once. It rankles, makes her teeth itch, to see him stare straight ahead, look at the judge or his lawyer, and never at her. He's doing it on purpose - he must be. He's messing with her. That son of a bitch is messing with her, while he takes away her marriage, her money, her house, her entire life, her children. 
She still loves him, even though he keeps his eyes turned away. She still loves him so much, more than he could ever deserve. She would tell him that, if she could, if they’d just give her a chance. She’ll find a way, somehow. She’ll find a way to remind him that she is never, ever going to let him just walk away. Break his legs, maybe.
The judge says something, and she blinks.
She wasn't paying attention, too busy watching Jax not watch her, and now there is a TV on a stand being wheeled in front of them all. Savvie gives a surreptitious glance around the courtroom, but no one else looks surprised. The jury looks bored, mostly, maybe. Or like they hate her.
It's not as easy to win over the jury now. She’s a woman whose children have been stolen by their vindictive, cruel father, who with his soft sad voice calls himself a captive during his testimony, stammering through the stories that explain all his scars. She’s no longer a violin prodigy in mourning, a young ingenue who just didn't understand what she'd done wrong. 
Or who pretended not to, at least. 
There were parts she genuinely hadn’t understood, maybe, although she is no longer young enough to want to lie to herself completely. He was never just her best friend, her confidant, the thing she loved most in the world. He was always going to be more than that.
God, he looks good today. Jax shifts in his seat, slight creak of the wood, whispers something to his lawyer. She just sees his eyes, in her general direction but not on her, as he moves. The lawyer whispers back, puts a hand on his shoulder. 
He might look confused, as he and the lawyer speak. No, not confused. Troubled? She knows just how to smooth the crease from between his eyebrows, how to lay her hand on his forehead until he gives her a slight soft smile, turns his face to nuzzle against her palm. She knows how to leverage his fear enough to get what she wants from him, again and again and again. The lawyer doesn’t do that.
Jax just speaks, even and strong. 
The lawyer doesn’t know what he sounds like when he trembles, has never slid the blindfold over his eyes with a knife in the room, not planning to use it, just wanting him to think she will. 
No one will ever, ever, know him the way she does.
Savvie straightens her posture, moves just enough to make her locket glint in the light, hoping it will catch him enough to raise his eyes to hers. 
Look at me. Look at me, sweetie. You don't get to stay gone for good, I don't care what you did, look at me. I still love you. Fucking look at me, Jax. Just one look. 
He keeps his eyes slightly down as he shifts away and back to look towards the TV, but he's tense. She knows every inch of the muscles under that old gray suit, how they move under his skin. No one, no one, knows that body as well as she does. She made the scar that runs soft as a kiss over a shoulder blade, and she knows he’s nervous about something now. Unhappiness runs under her skin like an electric charge as she understands that what he’s nervous about isn’t her.
She follows his gaze to the rolled-in television, one of the big heavy ones that must be ten years out of date, and she frowns, folding her hands in her lap, as Jax’s lawyer stands and speaks briefly to the judge, and then moves to the TV with something in his hands. 
“What is this?” She whispers to her own lawyer, one of her hands sliding up to run over the flowers etched in tiny relief into the surface of the locket. 
Her lawyer shakes his head, either he doesn’t know or he won’t explain. He’s doing what he can, she thinks, but of course she was never going to be acquitted. The scars she loves are evidence against her, the children are evidence all their own - he didn’t even want them, she grumbles within herself again. She told Bella that, over and over again, that her father didn’t even want her to be born, that Jax had struggled to even feign happiness, and still the little girl was ripped out of her hands just so he could get his revenge on her. James was just an infant, he wasn’t old enough - but Bella could have come running back in, before Jax walked away. 
Bella could have warned her that her father was going to steal their passports and her money and run out of the hotel, get on trains going different directions to throw her off, and finally head back to his fucking father, who she should have killed years ago when she had the chance.
Isabella should have warned her. It’s her fault, really, all of this. It’s her daughter’s fault that she will never see the outside of a prison again.
How many times did she tell her daughter how much her father must hate her for existing? And still… still, the little girl chose him. Savvie’s fingers close over the locket until the point at the bottom of the heart presses painfully into her skin. Her children, her daughter, her son, her husband. Taken from her, and she’s the villain here? 
How dare he.
The TV lights up flat blue until the lawyer gets the recording to start playing, and Savvie blinks as it opens on a recorded scene, showcasing a large room with deep green carpet standing in for ‘grass’, the walls painted with a nonstop mural of rolling hills, flowers, trees, blue sky. Daisies dot the wall, flowers made by tiny handprints in bright colors, each fingerprint a petal, with a yellow circle in the center and a green stem. She can see a yellow sun painted in one corner. Shelves line the painted walls, with toys and big blocky board books, stuffed animals spill out of a basket in the corner. There are blocks, faded with time and use of many little hands.
At a small table painted with dancing animals, sitting in a chair, is Savvie’s daughter Isabella.
She sits up, hearing her own chair creak, and glances sidelong to see Jax suddenly stiffen, eyes widening just the smallest bit. He’s surprised, too, she thinks, and then her eyes go to the jury, trying to read them. The twelve of them - eight women and four men - don’t look at her or Jax. Only the television.
This isn’t a new recording - Bella is so young, with her gorgeous brown hair so like her mother’s spilling in an overwhelming heap around her. This must be from six months or less after Jax stole them in the first place. Savvie fiddles with the locket, nervous in a way she can’t explain. Her little girl isn’t even wearing a dress, but instead swings her little feet in sneakers, wearing jeans and a Paw Patrol t-shirt, humming to herself.
On the table sits a dollhouse, one of those elaborate plastic affairs. Savvie can see a small claw-foot bathtub, a big four-poster bed, an overstuffed armchair. All of it faded, patched, or repaired as small hands have broken or torn or played rough.
Bella, though, sits quietly, and she is gentle with the dolls as she moves them through the house. She has in one hand a doll wearing a blouse and skirt and a brown ponytail, and in the other a doll in a suit with a tie. 
“What are we pretending, Izzy?” A man’s voice asks, and he comes into view, settling right down next to her. Savvie’s lip curls. Izzy? What an awful nickname for her beautiful delicate pretty little girl. Who would see such a lovely little thing, and hear as gorgeous a name as Isabella, and choose to call her Izzy?
“Mom and Dad,” The little girl answers, faint in the way of a distracted child. “I’m playing Mom and Dad.”
Savvie hasn’t heard her daughter’s voice in… in so long, now. She feels a twist of envy that the sound of that high piping voice has been taken from her, too. Jax is taking everything from her, piece by piece. She glances at him - his gaze is fixed on the television screen, mouth slightly open. Her husband, handsome if rumpled and ruined by changing his hair and his appearance, doesn’t take his eyes off his daughter. 
He won’t look at her, no, his wife and the only thing that should matter, but he’ll fucking stare at a recording of his child.
Not her husband anymore, or so he says, and technically he never legally was, but that’s not really important. They’re married for life. It doesn’t matter what Jax thinks. It doesn’t matter what he wants. It doesn’t matter that he took her children and he’s throwing himself in front of them like he thinks Savvie is a moving bus, all to get her locked away. It doesn’t matter.
He still belongs to her.
He does.
He does.
“‘Don’t look at her,’” The little girl says in a voice she deepens a little, looming the Mom doll over the Dad one. “‘Look at me.’”
“Is the Mommy doll saying that to the Daddy doll?” The man in the recording keeps his voice even, and curious. Jax, to her right, shifts in his seat and leans slightly forward. His hands are folded in his lap, closed into fists. 
“Yes,” Bella answers, glancing briefly at the man, then going back to her game. “She doesn’t like when the Dad looks at the little girl too much.”
“And why doesn’t she like that?”
“Because everyone is supposed to always look at the Mom.” Bella sets the female doll down briefly and picks up a smaller one, a little girl with pigtails and a pink dress. “The little girl scraped her leg and it is bloody,” She informs the man, very seriously. “She didn’t mean to make her dad look at her.” She has big brown eyes, and Savvie swallows, thinking now she understands why this video is being shown to the court. She remembers this - she doesn’t remember a lot of what Jax would complain to her about, what he kept calling abuse until she shocked him often and severely enough to make him stop, but she… remembers this. 
“How did she scrape her leg, Izzy?”
Savvie swallows against a burst of rage. Don’t you dare say it, Bella, don’t you fucking dare.
“Mommy shoved her,” Bella answers, and the courtroom around Savvie is so silent she can hear her own pulse, blood rushing in her ears. “Because she was crying.” Her tiny voice is matter-of-fact, it doesn’t shake with real tears or upset. She simply relates a thing that happened, play-acting it out in her game as if it were the most normal thing in the world. 
“‘Don’t hurt her,’” Bella says in a low voice, shaking the male doll over the female one. “The Dad says that. He is telling the Mom that the little girl didn’t mean to cry. The little girl says that she will be good and stop crying now, but the Mom doesn’t believe her.”
“Why was the little girl crying?” The man’s voice is so soft and kind. Savvie feels a sudden urge to find him in whatever hellhole office in Britain he works out of and strangle him to death with her bare hands.  
“The Mom told her she is a bad girl,” Bella replies, and droops a little, now.
“Why would she say that?”
“Because she is,” Bella says, softer than ever. At his table, next to his lawyer, Jax makes a sound. It’s not a word, it’s not understandable. It’s hardly audible - Savvie thinks even the jury likely didn’t hear it. But she did, and she looks subtly over at him to see his face is pale and his hazel-brown eyes are oddly glittery under the fluorescent lights. “She isn’t very good at being a little girl, she’s so bad. She made noises when the mom didn’t want her to.”
“Izzy-”
“‘Don’t say that,’” Bella makes the dad doll say, shaking him in the air, angry, picking up the mom doll to face off with him, their two plastic carved faces with fake smiles inches apart. “‘Don’t say that, Savvie. She is a good little girl and you are mean to her, you are being a mean mommy.’”
Savvie closes her eyes. Fuck. 
“‘How dare you,’” The mom doll says, and Savvie can’t quite force herself to miss how perfectly her daughter can echo her anger, how her voice rises with it. “‘She is mine and I will say whatever I want! She is mine mine mine.’”
Well… she is.
“‘Yes, Savvie,’” The dad doll says, Bella’s little-girl voice feigning depth, and from the corner of her eye she sees Jax shudder, the slightest movement of his body, barely perceptible. “‘But you can’t talk mean to little girls and boys.’”
“‘I am the mom and I can do whatever I want.’” Bella, expression deeply serious, sets the mom doll down and starts fiddling with the dad doll’s legs. She bites down on her lower lip as she works, finally figuring it out and Savvie feels her stomach drop as Bella sets the dad doll up - kneeling on the floor.
“What happens now, Izzy? What are you doing?”
Bella looks up at the doctor, and the grainy video of the recording blurs and lessens the impact, Savvie hopes. She doesn’t dare look at the jury now. Instead, she tries to think of what she’ll say - it’s a lie, Bella was coached, Jax and the lawyer and this Dr. Marty are all teaching Bella to tell lies, he hates her so much he’s poisoning her babies against her. Something, she’ll say something-
“‘Get on your knees for discipline,’” Bella says, in her mom-voice. 
Jax, at his table, closes his eyes and leans forward, one hand over his mouth. His shoulders shake, once, and it reminds her of every time she set off his collar, but much too quick for that. She can’t stop watching him - she shouldn’t, it doesn’t look good when a video like this is playing, but she can’t… stop. He looks so fucking good.
There’s a red streak, a flush, in his cheekbone but otherwise his face is nearly white, the piercings standing out even more than before. His hand grips over his mouth, and she thinks about every time she has pressed her own hand there, with a smile, to mute his objections. His eyes open to look back at the screen, not like he wants to but like he can’t stop himself, like he’s drawn to watch against his will.
“How often does that happen?” The man asks, in his casually neutral voice, and Savvie would put a bullet between his eyes if she could. How dare he, this is leading. At the same time, she feels a sudden swell of rage towards the little girl being led. Bella knew how to keep secrets before Jax left, did she forget so soon? He must have told her-... but no, no, he’s as surprised to see this video as Savvie is. No, this little game is entirely Bella’s fault. Savvie takes in a breath, lets the anger sweep through her, loathes her own child, so thoroughly turned against her now. 
She can lay all of this at the feet of a four-year-old girl. Well, not four any longer. But four when this happened. Or five. When is Bella’s birthday?
How old is she, now? 
Bella only shrugs at the question, lost in her game now. She has the mom doll tell the dad doll to stay quiet - “‘You’ll upset her, honey, you know better than to say no to me’” - and then acts out the dad doll shaking from the shocks, and finally makes him scream, the sound deafening loud in the silent courtroom.
She does a pretty good impression of the way Jax sounds when he’s screaming, actually. If the jury didn’t hate Savvie before, they definitely do now.
The man in the video looks surprised and sits back a little, then asks, almost tentatively, “And what does the little girl do?"
Bella sets the dolls down and picks the little girl one up, frowning at her. “She watches,” She says, voice low and soft. 
“Why does the little girl watch?”
“Because it’s her fault.” Bella’s voice trembles. “If she looks away, her mom will make it worse. She can’t-... she can’t help.” She looks at the doctor, something imploring in big brown eyes and her rounded small-child face. “She tries and tries and she can’t keep her dad safe.”
Damn straight it’s your fault. Savvie fights to keep her irritation and annoyance from showing on her face, tries to look sympathetic, maybe even worried. She’s usually good at this, but at the moment, she’s so angry at Bella for repeating this on a video, for giving Jax another tool to hurt her with, that she isn’t quite sure if she pulls off a sad expression at all.
“It’s not a little girl’s job to keep her daddy safe, Izzy,” The man says, softly, soothing. Reassuring. 
“It is her job,” Bella says, and shakes her head, looking at the little girl in her hand. “But she’s not good enough at it. She’s too little, she can’t do anything. I hate her!” She throws the doll across the room in a sudden burst of anger - it flies offscreen, but the clatter of it hitting something is audible - then claps her hands over her mouth, staring wide-eyed in horror. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry. I’m not angry I’m sorry, I know better, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry-”
The man speaks to her, trying to interrupt the flow of apologies, It’s all right, Izzy, nothing is broken, you are allowed to feel angry, you are allowed to be angry about this, hoping to hold back the waterfall of her sudden fear. The little girl turns her face away from him, pulls her hands down and rubs them compulsively, nervously along the seams of her leggings. She shakes her head at something the man says and looks down at the floor, the green-grass carpet, her own brightly colored tennis shoes. 
Her hands close into fists, as tightly as they can, a perfect echo of her father.
Jax’s shoulders shake again, and this time Savvie recognizes the sound, it sings deep down into her soul. It’s a sob, desperately muffled. He’s trying to hide it, but he can’t hide, not from her. She knows all his sounds of pain by heart. He says something to his lawyer, less whispered, less controlled. 
She thinks she hears a please, and hates him for giving that word to anyone but her.
The video cuts off, and Jax’s lawyer calls for a recess. Savvie rolls her eyes when the judge grants it - theater, that’s all this is, make Jax look all bothered by a stupid video, so he’s the sad scared little man and she’s the big bad witch. It’s so transparent, really. He does a good job acting, though, his face is reddened and she can see the faintest glimmer of a tear track as his hated awful father stands, from his own spot in the first row, to take him by the arm. Jax leans, just barely, away from him and he never looks up as he’s led down the aisle and out. They’re talking to each other, in voices too low for her to overhear, except to hear Jax’s crack a little.
Oh. Maybe he’s not entirely acting.
Savvie stands as the courtroom erupts into whispers, ignoring the weight of every eye on her and her lawyer’s attempts to get her to sit back down, looking after the two of them, and she wonders what about the video upset him so much.
Maybe it was just the crying.
----
@astrobly @finder-of-rings @burtlederp @wildfaewhump @whumpiary @whump-tr0pes @moose-teeth @orchidscript @sableflynn @pretty-face-breaker @raigash @vickytokio @eatyourdamnpears
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revasserium · 4 years ago
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beauty as a perspective (or a study of truth through the lens of a boy who has always believed in fairy-tales)
anon: And it is beautiful with Hinata First love with kageyama? Please :) 
101. and it is beautiful hinata ; 1.8k words
there are so many things he considers to be beautiful -- the sunrise, the sunsets, the way the moon lingers on the horizon after a whole midsummer’s night, like it’s waiting for the first rays of sunlight to spill across the world, the way the stars are relentless in their twinkling, as if emboldened by the darkness that beholds their very beings -- that they are made all the brighter by night’s all-consuming dark. 
there are other things too -- a well-aimed spike, crystal cut and down the line, right next to the pole, a perfectly arched toss, slow enough for thought, but too fast for the opponents to follow, the double-rolling saves that noya-sempai had promised to teach him and still hasn’t gotten around to, the way a clean sneaker sounds against the well-waxed floor of a freshly cleaned gym, the sound of a volleyball meeting skin, the flutter of a net, the chorus of voices as it echoes towards the ceiling. 
the cheers of the crowds when a point gets scored. when a match is won. 
the weight of happiness, so light and yet so, so heavy too, enough to make his bones feel like they’re filled with gold or silver or maybe magic itself. he thinks there’s nothing more beautiful than playing... and winning. 
until he meets you. 
your name breezes through him like a summer wind through wheat, leaving no part of him unruffled and untouched, all this thoughts tangled and out of ordered, but so beautifully so. he watches you go like a child watching the end of a really good dream, powerless to stop it, but still with the naïve hope that perhaps, if he just kept his eyes open (or closed) for a moment longer, maybe, just maybe you’ll stay -- 
“hinata-kun, its your turn to help clean the classrooms.” 
he snaps out of his reverie (did you know that’s the word for daydream in french? how fitting, right? and when tsukki had asked, drop-jawed and all, where the hell hinata had learned such a thing, all he could do was shrug and blush and say he’d read it somewhere -- to tsukki’s compounded shock and confoundment), the teacher is watching him with a hiked eyebrow, and half the class was giggling. but you, you’re standing next to his desk with a sweet, expectant smile and he’s lost all over again. 
(who was he, anyway? before he knew what your smile looked like? what your voice sounds like? what the color of your hair was beneath the morning sun, or in the golden glow of dusk?) 
“let’s do our best, hm?” you offer him your hand. 
hinata had never wished for after class chores to last forever, but he has now. 
he doesn’t know how you get onto the topic of volleyball, but it always ends up there somehow... with him -- and he finds himself rambling like he always does when he’s nervous, blabbing out an invite because yeah! it’s pretty cool! and there’s a practice match today! and oh, yeah! i’m on the starting lineup and of course you can come watch! i’m super awesome y’know! -- 
and then the horrifying, daunting realization that he’s going to have to play. with you watching him. with your eyes, like pools of amber so deep and clear they remind him of melted caramel during the holiday school fairs, with your smile like tasting a favorite treat after a long, hard day’s practice, with your laughter and your voice like -- like -- 
“what’s this? hinata’s brought a friend?” there’s something in the texture of suga-sempai’s voice that hinata isn’t sure he likes but he’s too nervous to call it out at the moment. instead, he tries desperately to explain why the hell he’d brought you along, not that he’s really sure either, other than the fact that he doesn’t ever want you to leave his sight ever again in his whole life but, well, he can’t really say that out loud without sounding like a freak -- 
“uh -- it’s not -- i mean, yeah! we’re friends! i think so at least -- well anyway -- ahhhhh -- she likes volleyball and there’s a practice match today and i told her she could come and watch cause i’m really awesome at it and she just moved here from tokyo, or actually she stayed in france for a while before that! can you believe it? hey -- wait do you know kenma from nekoma? they’re from tokyo too, right --?” 
kageyama fixes him with a flatlined look even as you smile. 
“she’s not from the same school, idiot.” 
hinata puffs up as he turns to kageyama but thankfully, daichi is there to pull them apart before things get really nasty. he flashes you a sincere and somewhat apologetic grin. 
“ah, thanks for coming. you can find a seat up there, and uhm -- welcome to karasuno.” 
hinata finds himself watching you go (he nearly yells when you wave at him from the second level, that is until kageyama elbows him so hard in the side he actually does yell). 
“focus, boke!” 
“shut up, crappyama!” 
“ha? what did you say?” 
“both of you, quiet!” 
they both flinch at the sound of daichi’s voice. 
but hinata can’t help stealing another glance towards you, thinking that this feels different, somehow. different than all the other practice matches he’s played before. it’s like his vision is sharper, all his senses on high alert -- he can smell the sweat on his teammates’ skin, can see each spec of light as it refracts off of the newly waxed gym floors, can feel the weight of your eyes on him like a superhero’s cloak -- beautiful and full of responsibility. 
and he plays well that day, he thinks -- got a few really solid quick’s in, and he only messed up on two of his serves, which, all things considered, is probably a record low for him. kageyama only yelled at him five times, also on the low side. 
they manage to scrape a win, and it was mostly asahi-san’s doing -- noya-sempai being awesome as ever, too. still, he thinks it’s been a good day. he almost forgets that you’re watching for a while, but only for a while, and as the match draws to a close, he’s again keenly aware of your eyes on him. 
he turns to grin up at you, shooting you a thumbs up. he finds you no longer sitting, but standing by the railings, your eyes huge and happy as you wave down at him. there’s a flush to your face that makes him want to walk off a bridge right into a very, very cold river but he shelves that thought for later as you make your way down the stairs, jogging right up to him, your smile so brilliant he thinks he might go blind if he stared too long. 
he blinks, still dripping sweat down his now very wet uniform. 
“shouyou! you were amazing! i mean, you are amazing --!” 
he almost jolts at your use of his given name, but then he remembers you asking (because you liked the sound of it or something; he’d forgotten what you said after that cause he was too busy marinating in the fact that you liked the sound of his name) if you could call him that. and him saying yes. 
“for a while there it looked like you were flying, like really flying!” 
he nods along with your excitement, his smile growing so wide his cheeks are starting to hurt and god, what what happen if he just kept on smiling wider and wider? what would happen to his face? would it stretch and keep on stretching? or maybe he’ll accidentally split his face in half and have to get stitches from the hospital, which wouldn’t be fun but for you, he thinks, it’s worth it. 
“y-yeah! cool! right?” he leaps ups as if to illustrate, but as with all things he does on a spur of the moment impulse, it doesn’t go quite as planned. he ends up smacking his head on the doorframe of double gym doors, leaving him whining, curled up into a ball on the ground, and you kneeling by his side. 
“shouyou? are -- are you okay? oh my god, what happened?” 
he winces as he pushes himself up into a sitting position, grinning awkwardly up at you. 
“i wanted to show you!” 
“show me what?” 
“what it looks like to fly!” 
tanaka is fussing over hinata, loudly asking if he’ll get a concussion while tsukki is remarking to that getting a concussion might be good for him; noya and tanaka are both laughing so hard they’re also curled up on the ground. 
you giggle, “save some flying for next time.” 
“for... next time?” 
“yeah, for the next time you play.” 
“will... will you be there?” 
you smile, nodding, offering him a hand. 
“if you want me to be.” 
“yes! yeah -- oh man, i do! i really really --” 
“good, then i’ll be there.” 
“aahh, that’s amazing! super great! ahhhh i’m so --- mmmm -- i’m so happy!” 
he leaps up and is about to jump up again before he realizes you hadn’t let go of his hand yet. 
he blinks, heat washing up his face like jumping head-first into a steaming onsen. 
“hey! you said you’d save some for next time, right?” 
hinata laughs, “right -- for next time.” 
you give his hand a squeeze before letting go, turning to greet his teammates. hinata watches you, like he’s been doing from the second he’d set eyes on you a week and a half ago, when you’d introduced yourself to the class. 
like when he’d all too enthusiastically volunteered to show you around the school, like when the pair of you had stopped in the library, and you’d run your fingers along the spines of all the books like greeting old friends. 
like when you flipped open a book of fairy-tales and traced the outline of a boy with melting wax wings, plummeting from the sky. 
“you know, i used to always daydream about flying as a kid,” you said. 
hinata quirked his head, “why?” 
you smiled, “dunno, seemed like a fun thing to do.” 
hinata smiled then too, “well, it’s not that hard.” 
you looked at him, “you... know how to fly?” 
“sure i do!” 
you laughed, then, but not a mocking kind of laugh -- a delighted, dancing kind of laugh that made hinata’s whole chest fill with hot air and helium. 
“you promise to show me some day?” 
hinata had nodded so hard his head might’ve come right off it’s hinges. 
“hey, what’s ‘daydream’ in french?” he asked. 
you blink at him, “reverie.” 
“wow... beautiful.” 
you laughed again, nodding, “it is, isn’t it?” 
and he decides then, watching as you smile at something suga-sempai says, as you quirk your head curiously at kageyama, making him flush a hilarious shade of crimson as well, that sure, there are a lot of beautiful things in this world. 
but none of them quite so beautiful as you. 
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technomaestro · 3 years ago
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Top 5 Video Game Soundtracks
Ok. Let's try this *again*. I had a whole thing written up and I accidentally refreshed the page, so tumblr ate the entire thing, and I lost it.
Destiny 2 There's a reason D2 is one of my all time favorite games, and the music for it is one of those reasons. Destiny 2's sweeping orchestral soundtrack is full of songs that encapsulate that grand, epic nature of the world and conflict you find yourself in as the Guardian. From the mission tracks like 1AU/Forge Ahead , Valkyrie, and Guns Blazin which provide this cinematic backdrop as you fight for your victories, to the epic swelling of the raid bosses where the tension in their first phases is replaced with triumphant moments where the tide turns as seen in Riven of a Thousand Voices or Insurrection Prime (even the most hated boss in Destiny has a pretty baller theme with tons of brass in it as you get ready to put him in his grave one last time after fighting him multiple times throughout the raid). Locations such as the Dreaming City have tracks that manage to encapsulate the mystery and history behind each location. No matter my feelings and critiques on the gameplay or the story, the music in Destiny 2 is just an absolute gift of musical genius. Michael Salvatori (yes, that same Michael Salvatori from Halo) is one of my favorite composers for the work he's put into that series. Favorite track: Journey ft. Kronos Quartet. This is the song that plays after the deafening silence that comes from escaping the city during the initial Red War campaign, where you montage your way through an unforgiving wilderness, powerless, as the city fades into the distance behind you. You've been beaten, your home taken from you, but the music swells with hope as you follow a sign from the Traveler - and you know you'll return to reclaim your city. I highly recommend taking a peek at the mission, as you can't play it anymore, to see what I mean as to how the track absolutely enhances the experience.
Hades Supergiant games - the people behind Bastion and Transistor, two other games with amazing soundtracks - really did knock it out of the park with Hades. This game's soundtrack is a wonderful blend of classic acoustic instruments (Check it out - it's called a Bağlama) mixed with metal and electronica to create a theme that evokes not only the aesthetics of the region, but also give it a modern twist that meshes with the dark, haunting vibes of the underworld that you reside in. Each track flows so well from one into the next, mixing perfectly with each area or character you encounter. And the two musical characters you encounter - Orpheus and Eurydice - add in plenty of musical flair to the game themselves. The motifs present in the songs are called back frequently to make it a coherent, consistent soundtrack, and it remixes so incredibly well. Favorite Track: God of the Dead - the theme for the final boss of each run, this track is incredible. Not only does it reflect the theme of Zagreus in a different key, showing the link between Hades and his son, before delving into this heavy, frantic track that perfectly encapsulates having to fight
Payday 2 There are exactly two ways to play Payday 2. The first is stealth - you won't have much in the way of music as you silently slip by cops, cameras, and civilians to reach your score. The other is the way I play, where you suit up in the heaviest body armor you can get, grab two automatic shotguns, and go to town to some of the best soundtracks in the game. Payday 2 has a unique musical cue system with it's audio during loud heists, where it amps up the tracks in time with what the cops are doing. At first, before you've been detected, you have the Stealth track which is always low and very basic to not intrude. In low points, like when you first go loud and the first responders arrive on the scene, you're in a Control track. Then, as the police gear up, it switches to a higher temp Anticipation Track, and then when the police storm your position, the Assault track. So each "song" in Payday 2 is actually 4 songs in one, that the game blends seamlessly together in order to match the audio with the gameplay. It's an incredibly clever system that keeps you immersed in the tension of the heist even as Bain, your mastermind, calls out over comms with instructions. And it helps that almost all of the tracks are exceptional bangers in their own right, with amped up electronica with great percussion and bass lines alongside rebellious hard hitting metal and rock. But during those assault tracks, there's something satisfying about hearing the build, reloading your guns, then timing you leaving cover to unleash fury with the bass drop. There's a great playlist here with links to the different types of tracks if you want to take a peek yourself. Favorite Track: I Will Give You My All - one of the few tracks with built in vocals. This particular track feels like the exact kind of music I'd see in a movie, and with the build I run in game for Loud stuff at the moment which incentivizes me running face first at bulldozers and cloakers, giving it my all is *exactly* what I intend to do in that game.
Horizon Zero Dawn HZD's soundtrack is full of the same sort of sweeping orchestral stuff that made me love Destiny 2, with tracks that serve to accentuate the world around you. The only reason it's down here at 4 and not higher is because there's a somewhat lack of variety; as a singleplayer story game, most of the music you encounter tends to be in cutscenes, rather than during gameplay. That isn't a *bad* thing however, and over the hundreds, if not thousands of games I've played, reaching #4 on the list is no small feat. The actual orchestral bits pair so well with being able to cultivate this theme of a world full of grandeur, the kind of which you'd see in nature documentaries. The various tracks illicit this feeling of a long forgotten hope, which if you know anything about the plot, ties in perfectly. The music that *does* play outside of the incredible cutscenes add to the world's aesthetic so well, pairing the sort of instruments you'd find people playing in the civilizations you encounter with the environments you find them in. Even the battle music, when there is battle music, is a tense affair; the game incentivizes you to stalk your prey, as Aloy is not a frontline fighter: she's a hunter among predators, and the music matches that tone. Favorite Track: A tie between Aloy's Journey, which provides not only natural sounds mixed with the instruments of the Nora and the underpinning of techno that permeates the story (in addition to one of my favorite musical things where you have these grand sweeping vocals that aren't actually lyrics) and Your Hand of Sun And Jewels, which gives off this sort of air of walking through city streets in golden sunlight, where people dance just a block away and you can smell the fragrant spices of the local cuisine. It makes me yearn and if I listen to it on full blast I can forget that I'm stuck at home for a moment.
Pokemon Heart Gold & Soul Silver Pokemon OSTs hold a special place in my heart because as much as I loved games as a kid, getting started on things like Mappy for the NES (which, now that I write that, really shows how fuckin *old* I am), Pokemon was one of the first things that I basically turned into my personality as a child. Silver version especially was one of the ones that *truly* got me going, as in Blue version I always felt one step behind my brother but Silver was *my* game, my generation. I have extremely fond memories of that game, from the Lake of Rage to trying to beat a ghost gym with a Sentret and it taking four hours because normal types and ghost types are just... immune to each other. But when Soul Silver came out and remastered the soundtrack, it brought back this wave of nostalgia. The bit tunes I remember had been brought to life, in a way that was recognizably Pokemon. Hearing it again brought back the waves of wanting to journey and be a hero again that when the game came out, I was sorely missing. The music in the game is upbeat and chipper, befitting a near solarpunk world that I want to live in. Iconic tracks remain iconic but with a bit of cultural flair, showing that the Johto region hasn't lost touch with it's roots. While it isn't the almighty trumpeting of Gen 3, the nostalgic tracks that are already evocative of nostalgia brings a yearning back for a time when things were simpler and I could just play games. Also, the Rival theme is *rocking*. Favorite Track: Route 26 Theme. Route 26 is also known as Tohjo Falls, the place which connects Johto and Kanto together. And for me, this route represents having reached a triumph and the energy to explore what's next. It's a critique directly against the Hero's Journey's unfortunate end, that they can never go home - the hero here *can* go home, but they choose to set out again for new sights. It's full of the fact that when it plays, you're taking your steps into something new, something bold, and full of new challenges that await you. It is, by far, one of my favorite tracks and the orchestral version brings me to tears.
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aedwritesfic · 4 years ago
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Hi! Can I have a Ginny x Luna smut story where they finally admit there feelings to each other and they are madly in love with each other and it’s at the burrow in Ginny’s room? Thanks can’t wait to see it I know it’ll be amazing! :)
Hey nonnie, I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to reply. Thank you for your patience. I had so much fun writing this fluffy and smutty Linny for you! Once I started writing, I just couldn’t stop. I hope you like it!
It Happened One Night
“Shhh!” Ginny tried to suppress her giggles, but they seemed to be bursting out of her like a child’s accidental magic. She cast a silencing spell at the door and the walls, hoping their laughter and conversation wouldn’t wake the rest of the house.
Luna stood on the bed, her riot of blonde waves cascading over her shoulders as she attempted to examine the rafters for Blibbering Humdingers or other such nonsense. They may have snuck a bit more of the Christmas brandy than they were necessarily allowed, but honestly, what did it matter? They would be of age before the school year let out and there was a war on. Now was the time for teenage rebellion. Now was the time to throw caution to the wind—in some regard at least—and truly allow yourself to live. 
Smiling, Luna crouched back down on the bed and continued her animated impromptu lecture on beings the average Wix could not see. Ginny tried to pay attention, she really did, but she found herself completely captivated by the woman’s hands.
Long, pale fingers danced along to her lilting ethereal voice, almost telling a story of their own. The still slightly pink scar on the side of the left index finger from an incident with a bread knife last summer, the almost translucent smattering of white-blonde hair along the knuckles, the deep lines on her palm that Ginny had studied during Divination, it all told the story of a life well-lived. A life that Ginny had been privileged enough to be involved in.
Luna’s hand accidentally brushed against Ginny’s and without thinking, Ginny captured it, lacing their fingers together tanned and freckled against alabaster. She allowed herself to gently manipulate the other woman’s hand, transfixed by the beauty and the power someone so light and unassuming could possess. With those hands, Luna could build something beautiful or tear everything down. People at school had been horrible to Luna, yet every day, she chose to share kind words, lend a hand, and love unconditionally. It was a marvel.
Ginny hadn’t noticed the stillness that came over the room. It wasn’t until Luna gently pulled her hand away that she came back to herself. Ginny blushed furiously and tried to think up an excuse as to why she had just been playing with her best friend’s hand.
Before she could say anything though, Luna leaned forward and tucked a strand of coppery red hair behind Ginny’s ear. “Please don’t,” she whispered almost shyly. “Not unless you mean it.”
“What?” Ginny asked, shifting under her friend’s penetrative gaze.
“There was a fire in your eyes,” she explained quietly, crawling over to sit beside Ginny. “You’re slightly impulsive, now especially because of the brandy, and whatever it was that flashed through your head… if you acted upon it, I think you would regret it later.”
She straightened her shoulders, sitting up a bit further. “I’ve never regretting anything a day in my life.”
“No, you haven’t,” she sighed. “But I don’t think it would be wise. There are too many Wrackspurts about as it is. I’d rather not have to deal with an infestation.”
“Why would you have to deal with Wrackspurts, Luna?” she murmured.
“Because whatever it was you were going to do, I doubt that you would have really meant it, and that would… that would be cause enough for an infestation.”
Ginny’s breath caught in her throat. For years, she had quietly harboured a crush on her best friend in the entire world. Luna had never shown any romantic interest in anyone and so she had just assumed that such things didn’t matter to the woman. Ginny had stopped herself from saying anything so many times, had forced herself to attempt to move on, but no matter how hard she tried, her heart always beat for Luna.
Turning to face her friend, Ginny grabbed Luna’s hand again, squeezing gently. “Luna, what makes you think that I wouldn’t mean it? I’ve…” she took a deep breath, pushing away her nerves and throwing caution to the wind. “Luna, I have cared for you for so long. Why would I lie to you?”
Luna smiled sadly, “I know that you would never intentionally say or do anything to hurt me, but—”
Ginny couldn’t stand it any longer. She surged forward, capturing Luna’s face in her hands and rested their foreheads together brown eyes staring imploringly into silver. Merlin, Ginny could get lost in those eyes that so resembled the early morning mist.
“Do you really not know?” she whispered. “You know so much about the world, you see what others don’t even bother to take the time to look for, and yet you really don’t know just how wholly you affect me?”
Luna sat back a little, cocking her head to the side like she did when she was drawing a conclusion. “You love me.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“As more than just friends.”
Ginny nodded and vigorously tried to blink away the tears that threatened to spill over. “I do. And, I completely understand that you don’t feel the same or are even remotely interested in anything other than friendships. I just… How can you think that I don’t mean every single thing that I’ve ever said to you? Every touch that I’ve given you?”
“No one has ever wanted to be more than friends with me before,” Luna said in a small voice.
“Well, I have.”
Luna stared up at her, a calculating look flitted across her face as she took in all the data that surrounded her: the slight tremble in Ginny’s hands, her eyes which implored Luna to believe, the way she bit her lip at the bottom left corner like she did whenever she was nervous.
“I didn’t realize…” Luna whispered. “You’ve only been with men, so I never thought—”
Again, Ginny reached for her hand, holding it between her own, cradling it as though it were something precious. “I couldn’t give a shit about what’s between someone’s legs. It’s about the person. I’ve loved you for so long Luna, but I thought you weren’t… interested in that type of thing.”
A pretty pink flush stained Luna’s cheeks. “Not usually, no. But it’s different with you. I can’t quite describe it, but it’s like all the rules change when it comes to you.” She averted her eyes and bit her pretty pink lip as if trying to decide whether or not to share a secret. But after a moment, she leaned in close and whispered against Ginny’s ear—the warmth of her breath tickling freckled flesh, “You make me feel safe.”
Before Ginny could fully grasp those words, Luna’s hands came up to run through her fiery locks tugging gently at the roots. She sighed and leaned into the touch. Luna knew that she loved having her hair played with. Ever since they were girls, the two had constantly been braiding each other’s hair or just touching it absentmindedly. But now, this touch, it was completely different. The pull was purposeful, it was meant not to calm or play, but to arouse. She allowed Luna to guide her so their lips were only a hairsbreadth apart.
“I love you, Ginevra,” Luna sighed before crashing their lips together in a searing kiss.
Ginny had experienced many first kisses in her sixteen years, some tentative and sweet, some passionate and sloppy. None of them had prepared her for this. They had not prepared her for the overwhelming softness of Luna’s lips, the way Luna seemed to be embracing her soul, not merely pressing her lips or shoving her tongue into Ginny’s mouth. She wasn’t being kissed. She was sharing a kiss. Though earnest, it didn’t feel as though Luna was trying to conquer or lay claim to her. It felt like they were joining together and making something brand new.
Ginny wound her arms around Luna’s waist and drew the woman into her lap, soft thighs straddling her athletic hips. She didn’t want to rush things, but the pool of heat in her core begged her to get closer, touch, taste, feel. But she held back. Luna said that she wasn’t normally interested in these sorts of things. She wasn’t going to push, no matter how badly she wanted to.
As if reading her thoughts, Luna pulled back slightly, breaking their kiss. Staring deeply into her eyes, Luna moved Ginny’s hands from her waist to breasts. “I want you to touch me,” Luna murmured. “Will you make me feel good?”
The breath caught in Ginny’s throat. “Are you sure?”
The woman smiled serenely and nodded. “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want you to.”
Ginny groaned, burying her face in the crook of Luna’s neck. She allowed herself to become intoxicated by the woman’s words.
“I’ve sometimes touched myself at night, wishing that my fingers were yours. It was nice, but I got the feeling that it would have been exquisite if you were the one actually doing the touching. That maybe then, I would really know what the fuss was all about.”
Sitting up, Ginny stared deeply into her friend’s eyes, that in the dark of her bedroom looked like starlight. “Luna, I haven’t actually touched a woman before. I don’t know if I’ll—”
Luna silenced her with a kiss before moving Ginny’s hand back to her breast and squeezing.
“Are you sure?” she asked again, wanting to make sure Luna understood. “It’s okay if sex isn’t something you find enjoyable. We don’t need to do anything that you’re not interested in.”
“Just touch me how you touch yourself,” Luna said breathily as Ginny’s deft fingers absently plucked at her nipple. “If we don’t like it we’ll stop.”
Not giving Ginny another chance to speak, Luna leaned forward and placed a kiss just below her ear, on top of the smattering of freckles that resembled the Pleiades. Ginny gasped and allowed her hands to start slowly unbuttoning Luna’s pyjama top. She marvelled at the pale smooth skin as gooseflesh rose beneath her touch. It was perfect, and she longed to leave her mark.
Unwilling to wait any longer, Ginny trailed hot open-mouthed kisses down Luna’s chest, from the place where shoulder meets neck, down the clavicle in the valley between the woman’s ample breasts. She darted out her tongue and allowed it to ascend the swell of flesh that led to the rosey mountain’s peak, cataloguing every moan and sigh she wrenched from Luna’s lips. Her fingers played with the twin’s peak, plucking and caressing.
Without even realizing it, the women had tumbled backwards onto the bed, Ginny nestled into the perfect cradle of Luna’s thighs. Luna gasped and arched when Ginny blew cold air against a pebbled nipple, hips bucking against Ginny’s own as if they were crying out for attention too. Luna moaned something under her breath. With a slight shiver, their remaining clothing disappeared leaving them bare.
Ginny took a moment to revel in the sparking rush she felt in every place their bodies touched. Skin on skin. All of it. At last. She drew up level with Luna and kissed her firmly, unable to think of anything else she would rather be doing until the woman broke the kiss with a desperately pleading, “Please.”
Unable to resist the temptation any longer. Luna’s breasts had tasted like strawberries picked at the height of summer and she needed to know if the rest of her tasted just as sweet. Ginny dove down, placing kisses and caresses along the way before coming to rest at the thatch of golden curls between her friend’s—her lover’s—legs. She looked up into grey eyes, silently asking one more time.
Luna reached down and buried a hand in Ginny’s hair, using it to direct the woman to her wanting core.
Ginny paused for a moment. She closed her eyes and tried to recall the few times anyone had ever kissed her there. What she had liked. What she had wished they had done. Ginny allowed herself only a second to marvel at the beauty of Luna’s cunt. How it glistened with arousal just for her. Knowing that she had done this. That she was the reason her friend was wet was because of her. That knowledge bolstered her confidence and pushed her forward as she licked Luna firmly from opening to clit, stopping only to suck gently on the perfect bud.
The reaction was instantaneous. Luna bucked her hips so violently that Ginny had to press down on the woman’s hips to keep her in place. When another lick brought on the same reaction along with a litany of moaned nonsense, Ginny hooked Luna’s knees over her shoulders and pulled her lover even closer to her by the hips, feasting on her lover’s pretty pink quim.
Not being able to resist, Ginny reached down to her own aching cunt and began rutting against her palm. The delightful friction had her moaning against Luna’s clit. Luna’s grip tightened in her hair, almost painfully as the woman screamed out her orgasm, squirting her release onto Ginny’s mouth and chin. The rush of warm liquid combined with the sounds of ecstasy and the delightful friction of her palm sent her over the edge, quivering and panting against Luna’s thigh.
The next thing she knew, gentle hands pulled her up into a warm embrace. Sweet words of praise were murmured into her hair while fingers lightly caressed her skin. When she came back to herself, Luna brushed the hair away from Ginny’s eyes and placed a soft kiss on lips still damp from her own release.
“You’re perfect,” Ginny whispered, clutching Luna close.
The woman hummed. “No, my love. We are perfect together.”
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kadeu · 4 years ago
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Accepted — Ajax Samuel
♣️    Samuel Ajax aka. Achelois looks like Hong Dabin (DPR) ♣️   He was born January 19, 1929 ; making him 92 but he appears to be 28 ♣️   This Healer is Bisexual and a Eight of Clubs ♣️   He is a healer at Fallon’s Community Clinic
Biography
when kadeu is given a good soul, it’s ready to corrupt it within seconds.
samuel is corrupted the second he’s born. his father, a jack of clubs, is not even aware of the fact that his third son has just seen the light of the day. he grows up as the only child of a two of hearts mother, with his childhood bedroom being a dark and sometimes wet basement who’s only source of light is a small and latticed window. he recalls his first positive memory being in the summer of 1937, when he wakes up to the sound of a bird chirping. it’s an unusual occurrence, has never happened before, given the dark alleys and roads of hearts territory are rather full of rats and scabies. it takes him a few minutes to climb onto a brittle chair and unscrew the brackets of the lattice before he’s able to slowly lift the bird out of a puddle and place it in a shoebox. there’s nothing he can do about it’s broken wing and it hurts his heart, it hurts his heart that the city has to destroy every little beautiful thing.
he starts to spend the little money he has on food for birds and puts every silver he has to give into the few animals that land in front of the small window and need to be taken care of. at some point his mother starts to call him ‘achelois’, she who washes pain away. his relationship with his mother is okay, not too good and not too bad, but as he grows older, he starts to notice changes in her behavior. he is eleven when his life spirals downwards even more and he catches his mother spending their limited money on way too expensive drugs. samuel is forced to steal the things they need to survive after one month only. at the age of twelve he starts to get into fights and soon notices that the only thing his mother inherited him is her blonde hair. apparently, he gets the rest from his father.
at the age of fifteen and a half, his father finds out about him, a man who’s wife had recently passed away and left him with his two older brothers. it takes him only one day to convince samuel to swear allegiance to him and defect to clubs. that day, he shaves all his hair off and leaves everything he has behind, starts a new life in a new territory. his father is a reasonable man, one that sees the potential and good inside of the now one of clubs. the young boy has a rough start with his older brothers. they’re both strongarms, don’t make training easy for him. but apparently, fate wants him to have one good thing, and he reaches the rank of six two years after defecting, with a wealthy and seemingly normal family.
as a healer, his species doesn’t offer the best basics for becoming a great fighter. compared to his two brothers he’s like a line in the landscape, a figure that has to focus on improving his agility and scheming because the limited strength simply isn’t enough. at forty, he has long reached the rank eight of clubs, which he has been able to hold for quite some time. but all the focus his father put into his fighting abilities, the fact that he got blessed by a deity was nearly completely passed over. it had been quite the surprise, something neither he or the rest of his family expected – and yet it was what made the relationship with his brothers even stronger. he was the one who would take care of them every time they got hurt, and they were the ones who would yell at him for staying up late because he wanted to study and practice.
after these forty years of his life, he met fallon.
and fallon pulled him out of the misery with his only decent healing abilities, took him under her wing and offered him a job at her community clinic. next thing he knew, there was multiple books about anatomy and sicknesses placed in front of him. the best thing about fallon is that she never got mad about him loosing focus or being slow at learning things - he grew up with no proper chance to study and she made up for it, until he’s was as advanced as he should be. around that time, he started to let his blonde hair grow out. and as soon as it was long enough,  he allowed some of the children he took care off to braid his hair while he was doing his work – something that became his trademark.
samuel is positioned neutral towards every faction and highly sympathizes with the resistance, but he does despise the higher ranking hearts, especially the facecards. he simply doesn’t express said hate.
Then there was Samhain ‘20
samuel was on a night shift when shit went down. it’s the night of samhain, october 31st and the only thing he was prepared for was some injured children or adults to take care of. this is something else. his wrist suddenly looks like a colorbook for kids, with all the different symbols splattered across. his rank had been there before, but it’s now accompanied by his faction and something that appears to be a crossed out heart. he slowly puts the sanitary napkin down and looked at the young child he was currently taking care of. he had a bad feeling in his gut, as if he was about to be sick, but he managed to push through it until he had a small break between patients and was able to go to the bathroom.
until now, people hadn’t been able to tell that he was a defector, but now it was horribly obvious. a bitter laugh escaped his lips as he slowly wrapped one of the sanitary napkins around his wrist, pulled his sleeve down a bit further and took a deep breath.
no one would know as long as he kept it covered. no one would know.
Personality
samuel is a very respectful and calm persona. he takes a good while to open up to other’s, there’s not many people he trusts – and he doesn’t trust easily either. he went through many changes throughout his life and while he had to be rude and brutal in his earlier life just so he could survive, he has now developed a kind and helpful personality – especially towards lowrankers. he knows how it feels to be at the rock bottom of the ranks. from time to time, he still goes back to the poor areas in hearts territory and ‘accidentally’ drops a few silvers in front of some doors or slips them in children’s pockets (he used to steal, after all, so returning a few things to the one he took from seems fair). he used to be full of hate towards highrankers, especially during times of yeon nen, but now that he has become one, he treats everyone with the same amount of respect.
Congratulations Alaric your app has been accepted and your first plot drop will be sent to you soon.
Please follow  @achelois50168 welcome  to Kadeu!
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thankskenpenders · 5 years ago
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So, about the movie...
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At long last, a week after it came out, I was finally able to see the Sonic movie. The Daytona 500 being held across the street from my favorite theater and conflicting work schedules had been keeping me away, but now I’ve finally seen it. And it was...
Decent!
Which is way, way, way, way, way better than a movie with this awful premise has any right being. That’s for damn sure. I enjoyed my time at the theater. I don’t know how they did it, but they did it. If you like Sonic and haven’t already seen it, you will probably get a kick out of this film. If you don’t like Sonic (or Jim Carrey), there is very little in this movie for you
Okay, now that that’s out of the way, it’s time to break that whole movie down. This will contain full spoilers for the Sonic movie
This movie kinda gave me deja vu because it’s set up so similarly to the Bumblebee movie. Both open with a slavishly faithful CGI sequence on another planet to ensure long time fans that the creative team gives a shit, but a conflict sends the title character to Earth. There, they form an emotional bond with the human lead as they’re pursued by the bad guys, who are working with the US government and tracking the energy signature of the title character. This setup worked extremely well for Bumblebee, because it’s so similar to the usual plot of Transformers. For Sonic, it was... a mixed bag. But it worked better than I expected
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(This shot does not happen in the movie.)
That opening though, huh? Green Hill Zone looked great, and I was pleasantly surprised to see they did, in fact, use the Hyper Potions track from Sonic Mania in the actual film. (The piano rendition of the Green Hill theme used later was also lovely.) Longclaw was also interesting. I’ve seen one person bring up all the bird-themed ruins in Sonic 1 and 2 as a possible source of inspiration for the character, and I think that’s a valid take. And man, the echidnas! I wasn’t expecting that AT ALL. I guess that was probably the Knuckles Clan or something? I would never, ever picture them being alive during Sonic’s lifetime, but like... I guess Knuckles had to come from somewhere, right? If they do another movie with Knuckles, will the rest of his kind have died out?
Sadly, though, this sequence felt like it was over in a heartbeat. We barely see Sonic’s life on his home planet, and we’re expected to feel emotional over Longclaw’s sacrifice when she only gets like three lines before Sonic is sent to Earth. This is a common theme with the film--it goes for these big emotional beats that it just does not earn with its rapid fire pacing
Anyway, then we fast forward and Sonic’s a teen. This is actually kind of an interesting one if you’re constantly neck deep in Sonic Character Analysis like me, because it’s a pretty different take on the character. It’s hard to give them credit for doing something somewhat fresh with the character, though, because like... how much of that was intentional, and how much was just Hollywood writers trying to squeeze a generic action-adventure movie out of Sonic? (Honestly, it’s probably mostly the latter.)
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The closest other piece of Sonic media to the movie would probably be Sonic X, a story in which Sonic isn’t really the protagonist. The Sonic of the anime is fairly emotionally distant. He cares deeply about his friends, and does nice things for them, but he’s totally fine with running off on his own for extended lengths of time, and he doesn’t really talk about his feelings. He’s not the character the audience is meant to sympathize with, but is instead this cool older kid who Chris wants to impress. This is pretty much in line with how Sega likes to depict the character. He cares about his friends, but he’s also cool with being a loner. It feels like he only runs into them incidentally, usually when Eggman is causing trouble, and then when the crisis of the week is taken care of he’s back to going on his own adventures. There’s a reason why one of his catchphrases is “long time no see”
The Sonic of the movie is the polar opposite. His main conflict is that he’s lonely and desperately seeks friendship. He’s also an overly-eager, extremely earnest goober. He literally flosses twice. (Which I loved.) I’ve seen him compared to Silver, and honestly, that’s not a bad comparison. I did like it, though! I don’t mind Sonic being a more emotionally open character, like he was in a lot of older Western media. I mean, he cried in like the second or third episode of SatAM
It’s just that, like many things in the movie, it feels less like a deliberate creative choice and more like a logical string of decisions to make when writing a generic action-adventure film for general audiences. Sonic’s the only one of his kind on Earth, so of course he’d be lonely. He has to have some sort of arc for audiences to connect with him, and if he’s gotta be accompanied by James Marsden for the whole movie, well, his arc’s gotta be about them becoming friends
I’ve gotta say, though: Ben Schwartz is great as Sonic. As much as I like Roger Craig Smith, I wouldn’t complain if he became the new main voice of the character. And thanks to the redesign, he looked great. I can’t imagine how nightmarish this movie would’ve been if Sonic wasn’t cute
My main fear with this movie, though, was that Sonic wouldn’t really be the protagonist. As a fan of Transformers, I know all too well that the cost of doing a full CGI character usually means that said character can’t really be the star of the film. Optimus and Bumblebee aren’t the stars of the Transformers movies--they’re supporting characters who are primarily present for the sake of the action scenes. The humans are the real stars in those movies, and the robots are barely even characters. I was terrified that Sonic would be the same, with the actual character I paid to see taking a backseat to James Marsden The Cop
I’m not quite sure if they struck the right balance there, but they did better than I worried they would. Sonic is central enough to the film and gets enough screentime that you can easily say he’s the protagonist. BUT there is absolutely too much of Tom and his family. The human cast is fine, the performances are fine, and there were a few good jokes, but every time the movie tried to get me to care about Tom’s life I was bored out of my mind. It’s just so trite and passionless. The other characters barely felt fleshed out at all, including Tom’s girlfriend (wife?) and Agent Stone. The little girl who gives Sonic the shoes had some cute moments, though
I do, however, love the part in which James Marsden is walking around in a San Francisco t-shirt, to remind us that he’s planning on moving to San Francisco... which then becomes the excuse for Sonic to think about San Francisco and accidentally send his warp rings there, which becomes the excuse for the buddy road trip aspect of the film. And as much as that was a focus of the marketing, the actual road trip part is like... maybe 20 minutes of the movie? There’s like three scenes with Sonic and Tom on the road and then they’re in San Francisco for act 3. The movie tries to act like they’ve formed this deep bond and I just did not give a shit. I don’t care about the cop. All Cops Are Bastards, and that absolutely includes Tom, whose dream in life is to join the extremely corrupt San Francisco PD
The whole excuse for Sonic having to sit in the passenger seat of a car going the speed limit for a good chunk of the movie is also, just. Stupid. If he doesn’t know where San Francisco is and time is of the essence, just... give him a map?
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And then there’s Jim Carrey. I was worried about this one. The previews tended to highlight his most Jim Carrey Being Wacky moments, and as fond as I am of movies like The Truman Show and Bruce Almighty, that’s just. That’s not Robotnik. I was pleasantly surprised by the actual movie, though! I thought he was pretty good. I’m not sure what incarnation of Eggman I’d most compare him to, but like... it was close enough, and he was entertaining enough. I’d pay to go see another movie with him as Robotnik. Sure. (Especially with how he was looking at the end of the film.)
There were some other little interesting tidbits here with Eggman, although again, a lot of that is less “let’s do a new take on Eggman” and more “let’s do a marketable movie with Eggman in it, which requires us to explain some stuff.” Like him straight up just being a normal human from Earth, with none of the confusion present in the current “two worlds” canon of the games. Or him apparently being an orphan who was bullied in school, and who trusts machines more than other humans. It’s a safe way to depict the character in a Hollywood movie, but I thought it worked
The way they got to his nickname was kind of funny, though. Like, obviously they didn’t put Jim Carrey in a fat suit, and thank god for that. So instead of mocking his weight, the nickname is derived from the egg-shaped robots he uses. Which made sense, I guess. It at least felt logical for this incarnation of Sonic, who had annoyingly been calling Tom “Donut Lord” the whole movie, to make up the nickname “Eggman.” (Said robots, by the way, were a weak point of the movie to me. They just didn’t have that Eggman whimsy and felt very safe and very Hollywood. Honestly, though, if they had just made Robotnik’s ship grey and slapped some hazard stripes on it, it’d probably be fine.)
As a whole, I thought the humor of the movie was... okay. Sonic had a lot of good moments thanks to Schwartz’s great performance, as did Robotnik. There were just so many weird lines, like James Marsden telling Robotnik that he was breast fed, or the agonizingly long child trafficking joke with Sonic in the duffel bag. Stuff like that
The action was great, though. They definitely owe a lot to the Quicksilver scene in that one X-men movie (I forget the one), but they had a lot of fun with Sonic’s powers and it felt extremely true to the character. Seeing him do one of his Smash poses during the San Francisco fight was great. The action scenes were an absolute delight
And then the ending. Oh, that ending
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So, I had already heard that Tails shows up in the stinger before I saw the film. And when I heard that, I expected it to be like, the classic Tails origin story. Maybe Sonic would return to his planet, and run into this precocious kid who decides to follow him around... but no! Not at all! Tails is already the Tails we know and love. He’s already an inventor, he’s already tracking down Sonic. I’m shocked that Sonic actually stayed with Tom instead of running off to have new adventures, but hopefully this is a sign that more characters will be brought into the fray if they make a sequel
And boy, they better make that damn sequel. This movie had a great opening weekend and a positive reception. They have no excuse not to. GIVE US SONIC AND TAILS GOING ON AN ADVENTURE
Other stray thoughts
Holy shit they put Sanic in the movie
The Sega logo animation meant that Kiryu from Yakuza was in this movie for a few seconds
The pixel art credits sequence, which featured both the Sonic 2 special stage and Get Blue Spheres as well as the Eggman logo screens from the Studiopolis Zone boss, was cute
The Saturn logo could be seen on the diagram of the other habitable planets
Robotnik had a label for “Badniks” on his circuit breaker. I wonder if the drones in the movie are intended to be Badniks, or if we’ll see actual ones if a sequel gets made
Also, was it implied that Robotnik committed war crimes for the US government
One of the government guys who I think only got one line was played by Garry Chalk and as such sounded exactly like Optimus Primal
I can’t tell if Sonic getting a red race car bed was an intentional shout out to the Archie comics or if it’s just a coincidence, but I loved it
A dude about my age wearing a Sonic Mania t-shirt literally stood up and clutched his head in shock when Tails showed up
After the movie a very excited kid got his mom to take his photo with the Sonic display in the lobby. Afterwards he was so excited that he flossed
I can’t believe they talked about Olive Garden so much
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secret-engima · 4 years ago
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Fic title thing - heart held close to the moon and Neptune
...
...............
Neptune ... Neptune was the Roman god of the sea right? ... Just looked it up and yes he was so-
>:D
FF7
Mer
AU
But rather than EVERYONE being mer or whatever, it’s ONLY the three Soldier Firsts of canon. Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal who have never met any other mer, because Shinra are immoral and terrible and use propaganda to promote the idea that Mer aren’t REALLY just like humans in intelligence and emotional range and soul, they just happen to look human-ish on the top half. And because Mer are seemingly extinct (read: in hiding), they have nobly “Resurrected” the lost line of the “most exotic creatures of the sea” in Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal and claim to be in the process of cloning female Mers to “reintroduce the species”.
Except mer are NOT animals.
Mer are the children of Gaia’s oceans, the pulse of her waves and tides, touched by her moon on high. Mer are MAGIC and they will not be contained.
They escape, by the skin of their teeth and with many bloody scars, helped by the last of descendant of the True Mer (Aerith) who can walk on two legs for a time because of her half-human blood. They flee, out into the wild waters, just the three of them as a pod, rapidly protective of their little Pod Queen Aerith, their little sister in their eyes for all it would doom mer to extinction again. So they swim, up river and through lake and through the sea, and sometimes Aerith stops to visit the human woman who cared for her as a child and to tend the garden on two legs while the other three lounge in the little pond and sing softly together, and it’s ... nice.
Then Aerith meets Zack. Zack who is a cheerful sellsword rather than a Shinra plaything, who still respect the Old Ways as best as an ignorant human can, and Aerith adores him and so despite what they want, Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal refrain from dragging him below the waves and eating him for trying to court their sister. But Zack is genuine and not cruel like the other humans they’ve met, he gets along with Elmyra and dotes on Aerith and Angeal ends up taking him under his fin after Zack nearly falls in and downs in the pond because surprise this idiot CAN’T SWIM, and really that is that. They have another human in the pod.
Zack tells them all sorts of stories, of the lands they’ve never seen. Jungles and deserts and icy mountains, and in those stories one name and description comes up a lot, the other, younger sellsword Cloud Strife. A fierce little mountain girl who still swears to the Old Spirits and avoids Fairy Circles and will not set foot on a boat until she’s made a sacrifice to the lost Children of the Sea. He describes his “little buddy” so often during his tales that really, it’s no wonder Sephiroth RECOGNIZES the woman while on a solo hunt, struggling in the water, bubbles escaping her mouth and nose, arms and legs bound from where she’s been THROWN OVERBOARD by pirates stealing the ship she had booked passage on.
Sephiroth screams and the storm screams back. The pirates stand no chance and Sephiroth pays them no more mind as he dives down for Cloud, ripping the ropes apart with his claws, swims her up to the surface and realizes that the storm he just summoned is a PROBLEM. The waves are too high for him to keep the human’s head above the water and she’s already NOT BREATHING and Sephiroth can’t just- UNSUMMON a storm, but this girl is Zack’s friend and Zack is pod which makes THIS ONE pod and Sephiroth-can’t-let-her-die-.
Sephiroth holds her close and sings-sings-sings, struggling against death, screaming to the moon to spare this human, to make her SURVIVE somehow, because Sephiroth has too few people in his life and he cannot afford to lose any of them, even one he has never met before.
And Sephiroth-
Sephiroth was Hojo’s finest creation. He was grown from the blood of the most Ancient mer. The Wild Kin even Aerith’s race of mer feared for their power, their savagery, their ability to wrap up the world in their voice and SHAPE it the way they wanted. Jenova is not an alien virus in this au, oh no, Jenova was The Sea Witch. The most feared and powerful and deadly o the Wild Kin, the last to fall in their war against the much more numerous humans and Cetra mer that had banded together against the Wild Kin and their Sea Witches. Jenova was the one who cursed the Cetra and decimated their numbers, she was the one to freeze the great northern sea mid-motion like a glacier around a great crater.
Jenova is, in a morbid, cloned sense, his mother.
Sephiroth sings.
The world obeys.
The body in his arms changes.
Cloud breathes in water and does not drown.
When Cloud groggily wakes up three days later, it’s to one very frantic Zack hovering over her face, the sky above her head, and the weird sensation of being submerged from the waist down. She remembers being knocked off the ship and sits up in confusion-
Looks down and doesn’t see legs.
The glittering tail of ink black and spiraling ice blue twitches spasmodically under her stare, responding to her desperate attempts to move legs that AREN’T THERE ANYMORE.
Cloud starts screaming and all the glass and quite a bit of nearby stone shatters.
While Zack and Aerith help deal with ... THAT whole mess, Sephiroth lurks guiltily in the nearby river, not daring to enter the pond while Genesis whimsically notes that aside from the ice blue swirls, her tail exact same shade of black as his, so does that mean she’s a full blooded Wild Kin now? Genesis and Angeal aren’t, because they have bright red and bright blue scales with black highlights respectively, sign of Wild Kin blood but not nearly as pure as Sephiroth’s jet black and trademark silver hair and slitted eyes. Angeal slaps Genesis over the head and says there are bigger things to worry about, because SINCE WHEN was any kind of magic strong enough to transform a human into an ACTUAL MER and what do they do now? Sephiroth already tried turning her back, but it didn’t work, because that kind of Song that remakes the world itself can only be used on a person on that large a scale ONCE, so now they’re stuck and how will they explain any of that to Zack’s formerly-human friend.
Sephiroth continues to lurk at the bottom of the river, feeling very guilty. He didn’t mean to do that. He meant to save her, not transform her, and the entire thing tastes too much of Hojo’s lab and his unwanted experiments and talk of using Sephiroth’s blood to create clones or hybrids.
Maybe once Zack and Aerith calm her down she won’t entirely hate him?
Who is he kidding, she’ll probably try to gut him with her bare claws.
(Anyway a sort of Modern-Fantasy AU where Mako is a thing but the SOLDIER program isn’t, Mer are a thing, and Fem!Cloud and Sephiroth end up doing an enemies to lovers slowburn but more in a you-transformed-me-against-my-will-so-I-HATE-YOU to friends to lovers way.)
(Also Hojo tries to do more evil shenanigans and Shinra hopes to conquer the world, but that all gets shut down by the Pod because fun fact you can’t run a wold spanning empire if all your ships keep mysteriously getting sunk. It’s not like you can helicopter EVERYTHING over the water, especially since all air traffic gets rapidly shut down by the mysterious super storms that blow in when they try. Reeve eventually gets accidentally kidnapped by the Pod and converted to their side so he starts looking into non-Lifestream power alternatives and Rufus is on board because honestly there’s nothing like a couple of mer arguing, IN YOUR LANGUAGE on whether they should eat you for your sins to make you rethink your life choices and by extension all your evil father’s life choices.)
(Also also Vincent and Felicia are both experiments by Hojo to see if he could create human-mer hybrids. Felicia is a sea serpent and Vincent sometimes forgets that Legs Are A Thing and so just sighs tiredly on Elmyra’s floor in all his red and black octopi glory. Veld is pulled on board the “lets kill Hojo and reform Shinra” boat after he nearly gets his throat torn out by his long lost daughter only for his long lost Turk partner to tackle her and talk her down from accidental patricide.)
(For reference, Sephiroth is a black beta fish with some silver edging on his fins, Genesis is a red with black stripes lionfish, and Angeal is a long-suffering blue and black lions fish. Aerith turns into a long-finned koi, and discovers quite by accident that if you kiss your human boyfriend enough times he gains the ability to breathe underwater and transform into a mer for a few hours before changing back into a human again.)
(And because I’m on a roll, Nanaki is still a cat-lion-thing, Cait Sith has underwater capabilities, Jesse, Wedge, and Biggs are all incredibly baffled humans who aren’t sure how this is their life now, Tifa would like to know when and how her best friend became a Mer (Cloud: It’s all catfish’s fault. Sephiroth: hey.) Barret is a monstrously overprotective dad and Marlene is the world’s cutest baby mer and Sephiroth would literally destroy the world for her if she asked him too. Genesis would help him. Angeal would just sigh and hold Marlene out of the danger zone.)
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movie-magic · 3 years ago
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Loki: Every MCU Easter Egg In Episode 1
Loki has officially begun on Disney+, and Tom Hiddleston comes bearing plenty of Marvel Easter eggs in the premiere episode. Here's what we found.
The premiere episode of Loki is burdened with glorious Marvel Easter eggs, from potential future villain teases to skulking Skrulls. Even before the considerable success enjoyed by WandaVision and Falcon & The Winter Soldier, MCU fans were eagerly anticipating Tom Hiddleston's return as the God of Mischief. Now blessed with his own Disney+ solo series, Loki has all of time and space to bother, and the premiere wastes little time throwing Hiddleston from the Avengers' frying pan into the TVA's fire.
After using the Tesseract to escape The Avengers in Avengers: Endgame, Loki is swiftly picked up by the Time Variance Authority - a seemingly omniscient organization overseeing the entirety of time and space. Evidently not ones to take prisoners, Loki's fate at the TVA looks grim, but Owen Wilson's Major Mobius intervenes, handing the silver-tongued variant a reprieve. In the opening episode, Mobius successfully digs to the root of Loki's dastardly ways, breaking him down to (presumably) build him back up, all with the aim of enlisting Loki's services as an ally to hunt down an especially vicious variant murdering the TVA's Minute Men.
Loki's premiere is predictably heavy with exposition, and relatively limited in scope, mostly taking place within the walls of TVA HQ. Nevertheless, Michael Waldron (creator) and Kate Herron (director) pepper the 50-minute installment with an array of references to the Marvel comics, MCU history callbacks, and hints of the multiverse madness to come. Here's every Easter egg we discovered in Loki's "Glorious Purpose."
The Avengers Intro Sequence:
Loki's introductory scene is somewhat of an Easter egg itself, retelling the famous Tesseract heist from Avengers: Endgame. Much of the footage here derives straight from the 2019 box office behemoth, meaning no other MCU stars filmed additional footage or recorded new dialogue especially for Loki. With that said, a few extra Tom Hiddleston moments are spliced into the existing footage to show events entirely from Loki's point of view. The villain's Steve Rogers "search and rescue" gag is zoomed-in, and there's a closer shot of Loki waving goodbye to Hulk in the elevator, as well as fresh reaction shots during the Stark scuffle in the lobby.
An Iron Man Callback:
After commandeering the Tesseract in New York, Loki finds himself falling from the sky above Mongolia's Gobi Desert, landing unceremoniously in the sand below, and this scene might trigger a sense of déjà vu for longtime MCU fans. In 2008's Iron Man, Tony Stark escapes capture by creating a rudimentary suit of hi-tech armor. Flying to safety, the genius-billionaire-playboy-philanthropist also lands roughly in a remote desert. There's a symbolic correlation in how Iron Man marked the beginning of the MCU, while Loki is now ushering in a whole new chapter, and both begin with their protagonists in matching predicaments. Both characters also crash while evading incarceration, though only Loki immediately finds himself in chains once again.
"Burdened With Glorious Purpose":
As a man who rarely shuts up, Loki has plenty of wry MCU catchphrases, and one of his most famous would be "I am burdened with glorious purpose" from The Avengers. Disney +'s Loki premiere leans heavily into the line's popularity, with Tom Hiddleston repeating the quote on several occasions throughout the episode, the phrase becoming less sinister with every utterance.
The TVA:
The addition of the TVA to MCU canon was confirmed ahead of time via Loki's trailer and, sure enough, the paradoxical pen-pushers play a prominent part in the premiere. Although their motivations and methods are somewhat altered from the source material (as well as their aesthetic, which now sits closer to The Umbrella Academy's Commission), the TVA hails directly from the Marvel comic books. They were introduced by a 1986 issue of Thor that featured several time-hopping agents, one of which picked a random Earthling up for jaywalking.
A Skrull At The TVA:
Given their propensity to shape-shift and assimilate the forms of other races, it's not surprising that a Skrull might be lurking around the TVA's front desk. One of the MCU's green aliens can be spotted in the background as Loki gets marched in, and though it's not clear why the Skrull is present, the distinct lack of guards would suggest they aren't a variant. A timely reminder that Secret Invasion is right around the corner.
The Time Twisters:
As you'd predict, Loki tries running away. With minimum effort, Hunter B-15 (played by Wunmi Mosaku) clicks a device, and Loki is pulled back to where he stood moments earlier, effectively making escape impossible. These time twisters appear to be standard issue at the TVA, and have a vaguely similar counterpart in the Marvel comics called the Retroactive Cannon. Far more lethal than Loki's little clickers, these devices would rewind a person completely until they were unwritten from history. Like The Algorithm in Tenet, but less confusing.
Life Model Decoys:
For someone who spent many, many years unaware he was actually a Frost Giant, Loki probably shouldn't be shocked that some people don't realize they're secretly robots. Heading through the TVA's airport scanner, Loki passes the test with flying colors, though he remains perplexed by the idea someone could be unknowingly cybernetic, Loki's line is a nod to Life Model Decoys, which have appeared in both the Marvel comics, and Agents of SHIELD. These lifelike androids can mimic mankind so perfectly, the LMD itself isn't always certain of the truth.
Secret Wars?:
Whether you've accidentally arrived late for work, or just escaped a group of costumed vigilantes by seizing a glowing blue cube from the beginning of time, being labeled as a variant is confusing stuff. Luckily, the TVA has put together a short animation to fill quantum criminals in on the basics. The helpful Miss Minutes finally provides an explanation of the MCU multiverse, revealing how, long ago, separate timelines fought an inter-dimensional war for supremacy that almost resulted in total annihilation. Since then, the TVA has strictly maintained one single reality - the Sacred Timeline *echoes*. The history lesson bears some similarity to 2015's Secret Wars comic event, in which conflicting universes came together in Battleworld (the setting of the original Secret Wars), and attempts were made to streamline Marvel's sandbox.
The Time-Keepers:
The TVA's infomercial also confirms the organization are led by three Time-Keepers, who oversee the combined reality and dictate the proper flow of history. This big-faced trio were first introduced in the late 1970s, created from the sole remaining survivor of the previous universe's destruction. The mysterious overlords performed much the same function in the comics as they do in Loki, and possessed virtually complete mastery over time.
Kree And Nova's Attack On Titan:
As the animated exposition rumbles on, Miss Minutes (voiced by Tara Strong) uses "starting an uprising" as an example of something the TVA might potentially frown upon. The corresponding image shows two armies clashing, with the blue folk on the left appearing to be Kree, and the force on the right possibly the Nova Corps. Based on the spiky ruins in the background, the battle is taking place on Thanos' home planet of Titan. In Guardians of the Galaxy, Ronan confirmed the Kree and Nova Corps were at war for 1000 years - was the TVA involved somehow?
Nexus Events:
This week's lesson from Miss Minutes explains how stepping off one's designated path can create a "Nexus event," and spiral out of control to spawn countless alternate timelines that trigger another war. This word has cropped up several times in the MCU, first as an internet facility in Oslo (Avengers: Age of Ultron), and then as an antidepressant drug during one of WandaVision's fake commercials. The latter was most likely a reference to the Nexus of All Realities from the Marvel comics, which is essentially a gateway between every possible timeline. The TVA's Nexus events could take their name from the very same source.
The Timeline Diagram:
Throughout Loki's Disney+ debut, the TVA repeatedly use diagrams of a single flowing timeline with branches shooting off to represent unwanted deviations. MCU fans might recognize this from Avengers: Endgame, where the Ancient One drew something extremely similar while explaining the consequences of time travel to Bruce Banner. Perhaps Ms. One has visited the TVA herself once or twice?
Devil In The Church:
MEPHISTO. There, we said it. When Mobius asks a young girl who committed time crimes in 16th century France and the child points to a stained glass window depicting the Devil, Loki knew exactly what it was doing. WandaVision dropped several hints that Marvel's own Satan would appear, all of which proved fruitless, and Loki seems to be heading down the same hellish vein. Alas, there could be a simpler explanation. Mobius claims to be chasing an alternate version of Loki, and it's highly likely the child has mistaken the God of Mischief's famous horned helmet for the demonic horns of Lucifer.
Ravonna Renslayer:
Though her name isn't mentioned in Loki's premiere, Gugu MBatha-Raw's TVA judge is actually Ravonna Renslayer, who made her debut in a 1965 Avengers issue. In the comics, Renslayer is a human from the far future, most often a villainous figure associated with Kang the Conqueror. She certainly isn't a legal official sat behind a desk. One would imagine Marvel Studios has something more interesting in store for Renslayer further down the line.
Explaining Endgame:
During his TVA interrogation, Loki quite rightly points out that it was not he who meddled with the timeline. T'was those pesky Avengers who penetrated the Quantum Realm and disrupted the natural course of events in the aftermath of the Battle of New York; Loki merely picked up the Tesseract that fell at his feet. Unfortunately, this excuse falls on deaf ears, as Gugu MBatha-Raw confirms the Avengers' ambitious time heist was entirely sanctioned by the Time-Keepers. This exchange more or less clears up every single timeline wrinkle in the MCU, including Steve Rogers' reunion with Peggy, and Gamora from the past staying in the present. It's not altering time that irks the TVA; it's altering time in a manner the Time-Keepers haven't permitted.
Loki's "Wooing":
After Owen Wilson saves Loki from being "reset," the pair sit down for a more friendly conversation, but when Loki warns Mobius that cooperation isn't an option, the TVA officer retorts with, "even when you're wooing someone powerful you intend to betray?" Loki has betrayed a fair few people during his time, and Mobius' accusation could easily apply to Odin or Thor. Most likely, however, Mobius is alluding to Thanos here - a powerful figure Loki tried buttering up with intent to usurp him once the universe was brought to its knees.
Josta:
While not strictly a Marvel reference, it's worth noting that Mobius is a big fan of an ice cold Josta. Viewers of a certain age might not recognize this soda brand, but Josta is a genuine Pepsi product that was available in the late 1990s before being discontinued. An early variety of energy drink, there's evidently a few perks to hunting down timeline criminals. In Mobius' case, this includes sugary contraband.
Loki's Greatest Hits:
In a twisted version of It's A Wonderful Life, Mobius tries to change Loki by examining his choices in the past, present and future. Unlike the jaunty 1946 holiday classic, Mobius has access to a handy hi-tech screen which displays Loki's "greatest hits." The footage begins with the God of Mischief's defeat and arrest in 2012's The Avengers - perhaps not an entry Loki himself would've picked for the highlight reel. The screen next switches to Phil Coulson's death (which Loki definitely would pick), before moving on to images of civilian deaths from the Battle of New York, the gala eyeball removal scene, and the dictator speech, all from The Avengers.
D.B. Cooper:
More an Easter egg from real-world history than Marvel lore, Loki reveals the truth about D.B. Cooper - it was Agatha Loki all along! In 1971, an as-yet-identified man boarded a Boeing 727, held the aircraft ransom for $200,000, then parachuted out with the cash. Mobius' dive into Loki's past reveals that, thanks to a lost bet with Thor, the God of Mischief descended from Asgard to pull the plane heist himself as some kind of stunt. From Loki's hairstyle matching the real D.B. Cooper artist's impression to the smattering of bank notes left behind, there's an impressive attention to detail in this scene.
Infinity Stones In The Desk:
The Infinity Stones... Thanos would give his own daughter just for one. Entire worlds brought to their knees by their power. Humans turned into Gods at the merest touch. Gary from the TVA's HR department using one as a paperweight. Threatening Casey with a fishy demise, Loki finally gets his hands back on the Tesseract, only to discover even Infinity Stones are useless within the TVA's jurisdiction. To Loki's immense surprise, Casey's desk draw is chock-full of discarded Infinity Stones, most either of the Time or Reality variety (no surprises there). The scene essentially confirms that the power of these fabled jewels has led to more than a few timeline variant incidents over the years, but perhaps also undermines the once-unstoppable power of the Infinity Stones. Well, the Infinity Saga is over.
A 3rd Millennium Kang Hint?:
In its final scene, the Loki premiere might just be hinting at the future villain of Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania. The MCU will soon introduce Kang the Conqueror, a major comic book baddie played by Jonathan Majors, and "Glorious Purpose" could represent the first step toward his arrival. Called out to 19th century Oklahoma, TVA agents find a piece of technology hailing from the 3rd millennium. Though it might be a coincidence, Kang hails from the 31st century, and is known for using advanced tech in his dominion of the timeline. The mysterious hooded figure is more likely a Loki variant than Kang himself, but since Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania and Loki both deal in temporal themes, it wouldn't be strange for the Kang foundations to be laid on Disney+.
- Screen Rant
Loki releases new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+.
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